open source
In Codeplex wastes six months reinventing wheels, Ryan Davis has a bone to pick with Microsoft: I saw an announcement [in March, 2007] that CodePlex, Microsoft’s version of Sourceforge, has released a source control client. This infuriates me. This cool thing they spent six months (six!) writing is called
programming practice
As I was paging through Steve Yegge’s voluminous body of work recently, I was struck by a 2005 entry on practicing programming: Contrary to what you might believe, merely doing your job every day doesn’t qualify as real practice. Going to meetings isn’t practicing your people skills,
markov chains
In Finally, a Definition of Programming I Can Actually Understand I marveled at particularly strange and wonderful comment left on this blog. Some commenters wondered if that comment was generated through Markov chains. I considered that, but I had a hard time imagining a text corpus input that could possibly
software development
In yesterday’s post on Crashing Responsibly, I outlined a few ways to improve your application’s crash behavior. In the event that your application crashes – and oh, it will – why not turn that crash into something that: * Records lots of diagnostic information developers can use to improve the application
open source
In Where Are All The Open Source Billionaires? I used this chart as an illustration: Because open source code is freely distributable, anyone can take that code and create their own unique mutant mashup version of it any time they feel like it. Whether anyone else in the world will
software development
Let’s say, just as a hypothetical, you’re sitting at your computer, casually chatting with a fellow programmer. You begin to describe some bit of code, then bring it up on your display to illustrate. You want to highlight some particular part of the code. Perhaps you move the
software development
As a person who has spent a significant part of his professional life getting paid to write software, I believe it’s important for me to regularly pay for software, too. Our programmer salaries don’t come from magical money trees. They come from customers laying down cold, hard cash
multicore cpu
Dual core CPUs are effectively standard today, and for good reason – there are substantial, demonstrable performance improvements to be gained from having a second CPU on standby to fulfill requests that the first CPU is too busy to handle. If nothing else, dual-core CPUs protect you from badly written software;
hardware
Last summer I posted a four part series on building your own PC: * Building a PC, Part I: Minimal boot * Building a PC, Part II: Burn in * Building a PC, Part III: Overclocking * Building a PC, Part IV: Now It’s Your Turn My personal system is basically identical to
software development
A little over a month ago, I announced that I was quitting my job. But there was also something else I didn’t fully announce. But I refuse to become a full-time blogger. I think that’s a cop-out. If I look at the people I respect most in the
.net
Way back in June of last year, I promised to donate a portion of my advertising revenue back to the community: I will be donating a significant percentage of my ad revenue back to the programming community. The programming community is the reason I started this blog in the first
unicode
These are available as bumper stickers and t-shirts: Here’s my rhetorical question to you: why is this funny? * The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) * There Ain’t No Such Thing as Plain Text * On the Goodness of Unicode