programming languages
Ian Landsman’s 10 tips for moving from programmer to entrepreneur is excellent advice. Even if you have no intention of becoming an entrepreneur. One of the biggest issues I see is developers getting caught up in the code. Spending countless hours making a function perfect or building features which
software development concepts
Does this look familiar? Temporary Post Used For Style Detection (14debf21-5e75-4077-9bf0-88d425739dc7) This is a temporary post that was not deleted. Please delete this manually. (f19173c9-9b1f-4430-8823-bae7c95236a0) Seriously. Enough with this already. I’m gonna hurt somebody. If you’re not in on the joke, it’s an artifact of Microsoft’s
software development concepts
We have a tendency to fetishize audience metrics in the IT industry. Presenters stress out about about their feedback ratings and measure themselves by how many attendees they can attract for a presentation. Bloggers obsessively track their backlinks, pagerank, and traffic numbers. I see it a lot, and it’s
frameworks
Alex Gorbatchev, after a long hiatus, is blogging again. What was keeping him away? Frameworkitis. This is the longest break in posting I’ve had in the last 2.5 years of blogging. Community Server is really bringing me — I just don’t like it. So, I started working on
programming languages
How in the world wide web did I not know about the “ I Rock at BASIC” t-shirt? We’ve all written this program at some point in our careers. But only those of us who truly rock at BASIC.
programming languages
O’Reilly’s History of Programming Languages poster is fascinating reading. If you trace programming languages back to their origins, you’ll find that we’ve been at this programming stuff a long, long time. * Fortran (1954) * Cobol (1959) * Lisp (1958) * Basic (1964) * Forth (1970) * Pascal (1970) * SmallTalk (1971) * C
software development concepts
Laptop magazine’s Attack of the 20-inch Notebook is a tongue-in-cheek look at using the Dell XPS M2010 as a portable system in a few different locations. Hilarity ensued. For context, here are the relevant specs of this semi-portable concept system: * 20" LCD * full-size bluetooth keyboard (with numeric pad)
programming languages
When you’re starting out as a technical blogger, you’ll inevitably stumble across Joel on Software. He’s been blogging since the year 2000, when computers were hand-carved of wood and the internet transmitted data via carrier pigeon. He has his own software development company, a few books under
programming languages
Brian Kuhn recently described the real risk of technocentrism. [. . .] people use (or have rejected) particular operating systems, tools, and software that has in turn shaped their perceptions when it comes to making judgments on the various merits of particular technologies. People tend to categorize or identify themselves with particular “technological
usability
Although I like Notepad2, it has some pathological alert dialog behavior, particularly when it comes to searching. Here’s an alert dialog I almost always get when searching a document: Thanks for the update, Notepad2. I really wanted a whole modal alert dialog to tell me this important fact. And
programming languages
Though I’ve become agnostic about the utterly meaningless non-choice between VB.NET and C#, the inherited syntax of C leaves a lot to be desired, in my opinion. And not just in the case sensitivity department. Daniel Appleman, in his excellent e-book, VB.NET or C#, Which to Choose?
software development concepts
I was browsing around the CouchDb wiki yesterday when I saw Damien Katz’ hilarious description of how technical documentation really gets written. You know, in the real world: Welcome to the world of technical documentation! The situation you are in is no different from any other tech writer. The technical