software development concepts
I like to re-read my favorite books every few years, so I brought Robert Glass’ seminal Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering with me on my most recent trip. I thought it was a decent, but imperfect read when I originally bought it in 2004. As I scanned through the
software development concepts
I have tremendous respect for Paul Graham. His essays – repackaged in the book Hackers and Painters – are among the best writing I’ve found on software engineering. Not all of them are so great, of course, but the majority are well worth your time. That’s more than I can
multiple monitors
I’ve been a multiple monitor enthusiast since the dark days of Windows Millennium Edition. I’ve written about the manifold joys of many-monitor computing a number of times over the last four years: * Multiple Monitors and Productivity * Multiple LCDs * Joining the Prestigious Three Monitor Club * The Large Display Paradox
software development concepts
Paul Buchheit on listening to users: I wrote the first version of Gmail in one day. It was not very impressive. All I did was stuff my own email into the Google Groups (Usenet) indexing engine. I sent it out to a few people for feedback, and they said that
programming languages
I was thrilled to see the book Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think show up in my Amazon recommendations. It seems like exactly the type of book I would enjoy. So of course I bought a copy. Unfortunately, Beautiful Code wasn’t nearly as enjoyable of a read
user experience
The original Tivo was one of the finest out of box experiences I’ve ever had as a consumer. I remember how exciting it was to tell friends about our newfound ability to pause live television, and how liberating it felt to be freed from the tyranny of television schedules.
user experience
We programmers are obsessive by nature. But I often get frustrated with the depth of our obsession over things like code coverage. Unit testing and code coverage are good things. But perfectly executed code coverage doesn’t mean users will use your program. Or that it’s even worth using
software development concepts
I recently received an email from Andrew Stuart of the Australian firm Flat Rate Recruitment. Andrew related their technical phone screen process, which is apparently quite similar to the one outlined in Getting the Interview Phone Screen Right. I’m glad to hear it works. A proper phone screen is
user experience
Heidi Adkisson notes that features sell products, but the people buying those products often don’t use the very features they bought the product for in the first place. A few years ago I did an extensive in-home study observing use of a particular computer hardware peripheral. Most people had
ruby
Joseph Cooney reminds us that, in January 2005, 37signals went live with a product they built in 579 lines of code: You read that right, not 60,000 or 600,000 but instead a commercial project written in less than 600 lines of Ruby code. When I first saw this
operating systems
Over time, I’ve become something of a desktop minimalist. Sure, I’ll change a few settings to my liking, but I no longer spend a lot of time customizing my desktop configuration. I’ve learned that if the defaults aren’t reasonably close to correct out of the box,
software development concepts
Greg Wilson recently emailed me the following question: I’m teaching a software engineering class to third-year students at the University of Toronto starting in January, and would like to include at least one hour on deployment – [deployment] never came up in any of my classes, and it’s glossed