software development concepts

programming languages

What did you write five years ago?

Here’s an excellent bit of Halloween advice from Mike Gunderloy: go read some source code you wrote five years ago for a real scare. It’s a good idea to go occasionally back to the well and get a sense of your progress as a so-called professional software developer.

By Jeff Atwood ·
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programming languages

Does Writing Code Matter?

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

By Jeff Atwood ·
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software development concepts

Windows Live Writer: making the Internet a better place

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

By Jeff Atwood ·
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software development concepts

The Field of Dreams Strategy

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

By Jeff Atwood ·
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frameworks

On Frameworkitis

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

By Jeff Atwood ·
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programming languages

I Rock at BASIC

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.

By Jeff Atwood ·
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programming languages

Fifty Years of Software Development

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

By Jeff Atwood ·
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software development concepts

How big is your Lap, Anyway?

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)

By Jeff Atwood ·
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programming languages

Has Joel Spolsky Jumped the Shark?

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

By Jeff Atwood ·
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programming languages

Technological Racism

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

By Jeff Atwood ·
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usability

Unnecessary Dialogs: Stopping the Proceedings with Idiocy

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

By Jeff Atwood ·
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programming languages

Computer Languages aren’t Human 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?

By Jeff Atwood ·
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