lua
Garry's Mod [http://gmod.garry.tv/] is a fascinating study in guerilla programming. It's an incredibly successful mod for the game Half-Life 2 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garry's_Mod] that essentially converts it into a giant sandbox powered by Lua [http://en.wikipedia.
technology trends
Riding the waves of technology in the computer industry is exhilarating when you're twenty, but there's a certain emptiness that begins to creep in around the edges by the time you're forty. When you've spent the last twenty years doing nothing but
game development
I originally discovered the fiendishly addictive Tower Defense as a multiplayer game modification for Warcraft III [http://www.blizzard.com/war3/]. It's a cooperative game mode where you, and a few other players, are presented with a simple maze. A group of monsters appear at the entrance and
programming
Last year in Programmers as Human Beings, I mentioned that I was reading Programmers At Work. It's a great collection of interviews with famous programmers circa 1986. All the interviews are worth reading, but the interview with Bill Gates has one particular answer that cuts to the bone:
programming
Part of Chuck Jazdzewski's fatherly advice to new programmers is this nugget: Programming is fun. It is the joy of discovery. It is the joy of creation. It is the joy of accomplishment. It is the joy of learning. It is fun to see your handiwork displaying on
agile
James Shore's nineteen-week change diary [http://www.jamesshore.com/Change-Diary/] is fascinating reading: > It was 2002. The .com bust was in full slump and work was hard to find. I had started my own small business as an independent consultant at the worst possible time: the end
software development concepts
As I alluded to in the T-Shirt post, Coding Horror stickers have arrived: These are custom, two color die-cut vinyl stickers based on the high resolution vector art so graciously provided by our kind benefactor, Steve McConnell. To give you an idea of scale, the coin in the picture is
software development
Steve McConnell on diseconomies of scale in software development: Project size is easily the most significant determinant of effort, cost and schedule [for a software project].* People naturally assume that a system that is 10 times as large as another system will require something like 10 times as much effort
regex
The Visual Studio IDE supports searching and replacing with regular expressions, right? Sure it does. It's right there in grey and black in the find and replace dialog. Just tick the "use Regular expressions" checkbox and we're off to the races. However, you'
open source
The unofficial wikipedia blog entry The Future of Open Source Five Years Ago [http://wikip.blogspot.com/2005/08/future-of-open-source-5-years-ago.html] makes some fascinating comparisons between the adoption rate of Linux and the adoption rate of Wikipedia. > Server-side Linux is still a powerful force, but what happened to the
health
Software developers, like pianists, rely on their hands to practice their craft. I've used a keyboard and mouse obsessively since my early teens. Fortunately, I have never had any problems with hand or wrist pain – nor have I experienced any Repetitive Stress Injury, which includes carpal tunnel syndrome.
cartoons
I recently found a link to a series of Larry Gonick's mathematical cartoons that were originally published in Discover magazine: * Beauty and the Beasts (neural nets) * Prime Time (cryptography) * Proof Positive? (probabalistic proofs) * Lumps, with Mother Nature (chaotic mixing) * Speed (relativity) * The Solution (traveling salesman's problem)