software development

software development

How to be Successful, Happy, Fulfilled, and Drive a Totally Hot Car

Wil Shipley, the entity behind Delicious Library, has a hilarious (and informative) talk on why he develops software for the Mac – and also netted $54,000 from Delicious Library on the first day with zero advertising. How to Succeed Writing Mac Software (176kb PDF) One of the funniest and most

By Jeff Atwood ·
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xml

Martin Fowler hates XSLT too

I have no problem with XML. It’s a fine way to store hierarchical data in a relatively simple, mostly human-readable format. But I’ve always disliked its companion technology, XSLT. While useful in theory – “using a simple XSLT transform, XML can be converted into anything!”– in practice, it takes

By Jeff Atwood ·
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usability

UI is Hard

Some users commenting on the poor pre-game user interface in EA’s Battlefield 2: Poster #1: They need to stop hiring angry little men and romantically spurned women to design user interfaces. Poster #2: But doesn’t that describe most programmers? Poster #3: No, that describes all programmers. It’s

By Jeff Atwood ·
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learning

Success through Failure

I found this Will Wright quote, from a roundtable at last week’s E3, rather interesting: Will Wright said he’s learned the most from games that seemed appealing on paper, but were failures in the marketplace. “I actually ask people when hiring how many failures they’ve worked on,

By Jeff Atwood ·
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Bridges, Software Engineering, and God

software development

Bridges, Software Engineering, and God

Based on the number of times I’ve seen the comparison come up in my career, you might think that bridge building and software development were related in some way: [. . .] my Dad, who is a “real” engineer, is out visiting for a few days. We got talking tonight about the

By Jeff Atwood ·
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community

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

Dare Obasanjo recently wrote about the failure of Kuro5hin, which was originally designed to address perceived problems with the slashdot model: [Kuro5hin allowed] all users to create stories, vote on the stories and to rate comments. There were a couple of other features that distinguished the K5 community such as

By Jeff Atwood ·
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open source

The Code-First Dictum

Traditional wisdom says that the “code first, design later“ approach is a bad idea. However, Charles Miller points out that when it comes to open source projects, it’s mandatory: I would almost go as far as saying that starting an open source project with no code and a committee

By Jeff Atwood ·
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productivity

Schedule Games

Johanna Rothman posted a number of what she calls Schedule Games on her product development blog: 1. Schedule Chicken 2. 90% Done 3. Bring Me a Rock 4. Hope is Our Most Important Strategy 5. Queen of Denial 6. Sweep Under the Rug 7. Schedule Dream Time or Happy Date

By Jeff Atwood ·
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diversity

Cognitive Diversity

A few months ago there was a little brouhaha about lack of diversity in weblog authors, which caused a few ripples. Julia Lerman asks the same question about software development in a recent interview: I think that the lack of women in visible roles in our community is one of

By Jeff Atwood ·
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Barcodes and QR Codes

barcode

Barcodes and QR Codes

I recently purchased a USB CueCat from eBay to play around with UPC barcodes, which I found out about from comments posted in a Scott Hanselman blog entry. It’s fun to run around the house scanning in UPCs from household items, although the low-powered LED reader in the CueCat

By Jeff Atwood ·
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.net

The bloated world of Managed Code

Mark Russinovich recently posted a blog entry bemoaning the bloated footprint of managed .NET apps compared to their unmanaged equivalents. He starts by comparing a trivial managed implementation of Notepad to the one that ships with Windows: First notice the total CPU time consumed by each process. Remember, all I’

By Jeff Atwood ·
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prototyping

The Prototype Pitfall

Tim Weaver, channeling Robert Glass, on the five laws of prototypes: 1. The answer to any prototype / feasibility question is always yes 2. Whatever poor coding practices you use to build your prototype will be replicated in the final production version 3. No matter how poor the performance of the

By Jeff Atwood ·
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