programming languages
Ever have one of those days where everything you check into source control is wrong? Also, how exactly is that day is different from any other? But seriously. Code that is visible is code that can be wrong. No surprise there. But did you know that even the code you
programming languages
Ah, spring. What a wonderful time of year. A time when young programmers' minds turn to thoughts of ... neverending last-man-standing filibuster arguments about code formatting. Naturally. And there is no argument more evergreen than the timeless debate between tabs and spaces. On defaultly-configured Unix systems, and on ancient dumb
design patterns
A common response to The Ferengi Programmer: From what I can see, the problem of "overly-rule-bound developers" is nowhere near the magnitude of the problem of "developers who don't really have a clue." The majority of developers do not suffer from too much design
web development
Pop quiz, hotshot. Which one is the superior Uniform Resource Locator? www.fakeplasticrock.com or fakeplasticrock.com This is one of those intractable problems. Global wars have been fought over so much less. In hacker circles, this is sometimes referred to as a bikeshed discussion. That said, I do have
programming practices
Is software development an activity preferred by anti-social, misanthropic individuals who'd rather deal with computers than other people? If so, does it then follow that all software projects are best performed by a single person, working alone? The answer to the first question may be a reluctant yes,
programming practices
From an audio interview with Ron Jeffries: The reason the kitchen is a mess is not because the kitchen is poorly designed, it's because we didn't do the dishes after every meal. Michael Feathers recently wrote an eerily similar entry about the professional chef's
software development concepts
Thanks to my friend Geoff Dalgas for pointing out this interesting article at kuro5hin.org, which analyzes the comments inside the recently leaked Microsoft Windows NT/2k code. Very amusing, with some surprising insights into the mindset of the coders working at Microsoft: In the struggle to meet deadlines, I