Hackers & Painters Paul Graham O’Reilly, 2004 I was really looking forward to reading this book. I had read a few of Graham’s essays in the past and found his ideas to be thought-provoking. I expected some to find more of the same. Instead, this book ranged over a lot of topics, not all of… Read More »
This is a very simple concept that seems to escape many people. In fact, most of the multi-threaded code I’ve seen shows a distinct misunderstanding of this basic fact. Very often people seem to think that a mutex should protect a section of code. I think this misconception may have been caused by the term… Read More »
C++ Coding Standards Herb Sutter and Andrei Alexandrescu Addison-Wesley, 2005 For many programmers, the term coding standard generates a gut-level response. We all know that someone is going to be pushing the one, true brace style or the proper way to indent code. This subject is probably the best way to generate instantaneous rebellion among… Read More »
CSS Cookbook Christopher Schmitt O’Reilly, 2004 This has become my new favorite book on CSS. For quite some time, the only way to learn to use CSS in website design was search the web for references, keep CSS: The Definitive Guide by your side, and experiment. The problem is that the interactions with the different… Read More »
What is it about the programming field that makes everyone believe that it is easy? I can’t count the number of times I have had someone tell me: All you have to do is… How hard can it be? You just… It won’t take that long. It’s just a little program. etc. Most of these… Read More »
Over the years I’ve been a programmer, there seem to be two distinct areas of knowledge for any project. The first relates to programming. The second relates to the domain of the project. Over the almost two decades I’ve been programming professionally, I have worked in many domains. Interestingly, I have never started working on… Read More »
Many years ago, I spent a lot of time training entry-level programmers. One of the problems that the more junior programmers had was duplicating code and information in the code. Some of our senior programmers at the time began talking about the concept of the one, right place. Later, I read the book The Programmatic… Read More »
At different times in the past I’ve either agreed with or fought the application of coding standards. Recently, I’ve been looking at the subject again. In a wonderful case of timing I stumbled across an ad in CUJ (10/2004) for CodingStandard.Com. They have a coding standard for C++ that seems to cover much of what… Read More »
In The Forgotten Engineering Principle, I went on at some length about the concept of Good Enough. I originally began thinking about this idea over a decade ago in the context of Stylus-Based Computers (what are now called Tablet PCs). I hadn’t thought about the concept for quite a long time. However, in doing a… Read More »
Over the last few years, I’ve been frustrated with the Software Engineering industry. I was actually trained as an engineer, and much of what I see passed off as software engineering is not engineering. I’ve been mulling this over for some time without being able to put my finger on the part that bothers me.… Read More »