software development
I find it helpful to revisit Steve McConnell’s list of classic development process mistakes, and the accompanying case study, at least once every year. Stop me if you've heard this one before: “Look, Mike,” Tomas said. “I can hand off my code today and call it ‘feature
podcast
It was my great honor to participate in this week’s episode of .NET Rocks! .NET Rocks! is a long running internet radio talk show for software developers that goes all the way back to 2002. I’ve listened to their shows off and on for years. They’ve interviewed
software development
If I told you to choose between two technical books, one by renowned Windows author Charles Petzold, and another by some guy you’ve probably never heard of, which one would you pick? That’s what I thought too. Until I sat down to read both of them. Take a
open source
Hugh MacLeod asks, if open source is so great, where are all the open source billionaires? If Open Source software is free, then why bother spending money on Microsoft Partner stuff? I already know what Microsoft’s detractors will say: “There’s no reason whatsoever. $40 billion per year is
security
I picked up a free copy of 19 Deadly Sins of Software Security at a conference last year. I didn’t expect the book to be good because it was a free giveaway item from one of the the vendor booths. But I paged through it on the flight home,
lisp
My previous entry, Twitter: Service vs. Platform, was widely misunderstood. I suppose I only have myself to blame, so I’ll try to clarify with another example. Consider Reddit. The Reddit development team switched from Lisp to Python late in 2005: If Lisp is so great, why did we stop
software development
Electronic Arts is a lumbering corporate megalith today, pumping out yearly game franchise after yearly game franchise. It’s easy to forget that EA was present at the very beginning of the computer game industry, innovating and blazing a trail for everyone to follow. Gamasutra’s article We See Farther:
software development
Alistair Cockburn maintains that software development is a cooperative game: If software development was really a science, you could apply the scientific method to it. If it was really engineering, then you could apply known engineering techniques. If software development was a matter of producing models, then you could spend
software development
I’ve seen a lot of painfully bad IT web comics in my day, but I’m happy to say that Bug Bash, by Hans Bjordahl, is not one of them. This particular strip is one of my favorites because it hits so close to home. Software developers truly believe,
software development
Joseph Cooney had a brilliant idea for a new application certification program. But Vista’s bland white-on-gray badge, in my opinion, doesn’t properly communicate the... authoritative... nature of said program. With the help of Jon Galloway, we zazzed things up a bit: You might think attaining such a prestigious,
internationalization
Internationalization of software is incredibly challenging. Consider this Wikipedia sandbox page in Arabic, which is a right-to-left (RTL) language: Compare that layout with the Wikipedia page on internationalization and localization in English. Now consider how you’d implement switching between English and Arabic in MediaWiki, the software that powers Wikipedia:
origami
Robert J. Lang isn’t just a physicist and a software developer – he’s also one of the world’s foremost paper-folding artists: The laser cutter was growling away, scoring one of Lang’s Hanji sheets. He twiddled with his computer. On the screen was a lacy geometric pattern. Lang