software development
If you’re at all familiar with computer history, you might have heard of Bill Gates’ famous 1976 letter to the Homebrew Computer Club. The letter was written to address rampant piracy of Bill’s earliest product, Altair BASIC, which was being passed around quite freely by hobbyists in paper
legacy hardware
Does anyone remember the Turbo Button from older IBM PC models? A leftover from machines of five to ten years ago, the turbo switch still remains on many cases, even though it serves no purpose. In the early days of the PC, there was only IBM, and there were only
logging
A recent Stack Overflow post described one programmer’s logging style. Here’s what he logs: INFO Level * The start and end of the method * The start and end of any major loops * The start of any major case/switch statements DEBUG Level * Any parameters passed into the method * Any
software development
Software: do you write it like a book, grow it like a plant, accrete it like a pearl, or construct it like a building? As Steve McConnell notes in Code Complete 2, there’s no shortage of software development metaphors: A confusing abundance of metaphors has grown up around software
remote work
I’ve been a fan of Dan Appleman for about as long as I’ve been a professional programmer. He is one of my heroes. Unfortunately, Dan only blogs rarely, so I was heartened to see a spate of recent blog updates from him. One of the entries asks a
bug tracking
For as long as I’ve been a software developer and used bug tracking systems, we have struggled with the same fundamental problem in every single project we’ve worked on: how do you tell bugs from feature requests? Sure, there are some obvious crashes that are clearly bugs. But
programming
In The Programming Aphorisms of Strunk and White, James Devlin does a typically excellent job of examining something I’ve been noticing myself over the last five years: The unexpected relationship between writing code and writing. There is perhaps no greater single reference on the topic of writing than Strunk
microsoft
By now I’m sure you’ve at least heard of, if not already seen, the new Windows Vista advertisements featuring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld. They haven’t been well received, to put it mildly, but the latest commercial is actually not bad in its longer 4 minute version:
multi-threading
You may have noticed that my posting frequency has declined over the last three weeks. That’s because I’ve been busy building that Stack Overflow thing we talked about. It’s going well so far. Joel Spolsky also seems to think it’s going well, but he’s one
version control
I consider this the golden rule of source control: Check in early, check in often. Developers who work for long periods – and by long I mean more than a day – without checking anything into source control are setting themselves up for some serious integration headaches down the line. Damon Poole
software development
Although I love reading programming books, I find software project management books to be some of the most mind-numbingly boring reading I’ve ever attempted. I suppose this means I probably shouldn’t be a project manager. The bad news for the Stack Overflow team is that I effectively am
software development
Nathan Bowers pointed me to this five year old Cool Tools entry on the book Art & Fear. Although I am not at all ready to call software development “art” – perhaps “craft” would be more appropriate, or “engineering” if you’re feeling generous – the parallels between some of the advice