Over the last few years, I have spent a lot of time talking to lots of different people about object-oriented programming (OOP). I have spent a fair portion of the last three years interviewing and screening people over the phone for development positions. This activity has caused me to spend some time re-evaluating what I… Read More »
Information Dashboard Design Stephen Few O’Reilly, 2006 This book covers a growing trend in user interfaces, the dashboard. The purpose of a dashboard is to display important information clearly and concisely. The author makes a point of stating that a dashboard must convey information you need to act on. This generates a shift in viewpoint… Read More »
Several times in the last few years, I have written about the subject of memory management, garbage collection, and object lifetime. Some of essays I’ve written on this subject include: The Semantics of Garbage Collection More Thoughts on Resource Recovery Other Resource Recovery Approaches Resource Management Revisited Recently, I was thinking about this issue again… Read More »
Managing Humans Michael Lopp Apress, 2007 Michael Lopp (also known as Rands) describes his take on managing software people. This book is very different from the few other management books I’ve read. Part of the difference is that Lopp writes all of his examples as fiction. He admits this at the beginning. Rather than tell… Read More »
Ever since O’Reilly published the new book Beautiful Code, there seem to be references everywhere to what makes code beautiful. While a few people have suggested that beauty should not influence code (see the comments section for the suggestion that there is no beautiful code), I believe that most people have seen code that they… Read More »
Several newer languages (as in less than 10 years old) have been designed around the idea that everything is an object. Since I started programming professionally almost two decades ago, I was programming before the object craze became mainstream. I have done the OO thing for over a decade and am not as impressed as… Read More »
Smart & Gets Things Done Joel Spolsky Apress, 2007 This book represents Joel Spolsky’s approach to hiring programmers. Smart & Gets Things Done is based on Spolsky’s weblog, like his previous book, Joel on Software. In this book, Joel brings together his various writings on hiring software developers. Not surprisingly, Joel bucks traditional wisdom on… Read More »
What is it with programmers who don’t read? Most of the best programmers I know are constantly learning. They seem to have an insatiable curiosity for any topic they are interested in. These programmers are often reading websites, books, and magazines almost constantly to help extend their knowledge and understanding. Others never seem to read… Read More »
I’m finally getting back to my blog after YAPC::NA. It’s been a while since I wrote, so I figured I would start off easy. Many months ago, I stumbled across yet another article describing how hard exceptions are (The Old New Thing : Cleaner, more elegant, and harder to recognize). It’s an old article and… Read More »
As a short break from my normal programming oriented blog entries, I figured I should comment about YAPC::NA 2007 which we (Houston.pm) are hosting. The conference is currently running (June 25 – 27) at University of Houston, Central Campus. Eight-ish months ago, Jeremy Fluhmann talked us into putting in a bid for YAPC. Despite quite… Read More »