Reading Dave Thomas’s blog on Code Kata pointed to PragDave: MoreKata. I also stumbled across How To Practice on Chad Fowler’s blog. Both of these entries discuss exercises that we can use to master the art of programming. Perhaps surprisingly, they use metaphors and concepts from martial arts and Zen. Those of us who have… Read More »
I’m not quite sure what lead me to this blog entry, but I find PragDave: Code Kata by Dave Thomas to be a very interesting idea. I had never thought of describing coding practice as similar to kata. I did stumble into a similar idea once many years ago. I had just finished reading Software… Read More »
Why is it that some people regularly suggest that someday soon we won’t need programmers? I’ve recently been seeing this as part of the IT outsourcing debate. But, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen it. The first time I saw this meme was shortly after I started programming professionally 17 years ago. I talked… Read More »
Programming Pearls, Second Edition Jon Bentley ACM Press, Addison-Wesley, 2000 One of my favorite programming books of all time now has a second edition. I’ve got to say it’s as good as the original. Many years ago, I stumbled across Jon Bentley’s Programming Pearls. It is a great book on programming. It did not focus… Read More »
George A. Miller’s paper The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information discussed some limits of the human brain with respect to information processing. In particular, his research had found that people are unable to keep up with more than 5-9 different chunks of information at a… Read More »
Peopleware Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister Dorset House Publishing Co., 1987 If you are a manager trying to get better work out of your programming staff, you need to read this book. If you are a project lead trying to be determine how to make your team more effective, you need to read this book.… Read More »
Almost fifteen years ago, I stumbled across the concept of version control in the form of RCS. I wasn’t real sure that this tool was going to be useful for me. After all, it required more work that did not contribute directly to producing code. In order to try it out, I began using RCS… Read More »
Randomness Deborah J. Bennett Harvard University Press, 1998 This book covers the subjects of randomness, probability, and statistics better than any other book for the layman I’ve ever seen. As a programmer, most of the books I’ve read on these topics are either heavily into the math and theory of the subject or focused on… Read More »
I’ve already written some of my ideas about paradigms, but the most important point still remains. I maintain that the real benefit of a paradigm is not the way of thinking that it defines, but the contrast between this way of thinking and others. Almost every programmer I’ve ever met that only knows one paradigm… Read More »
And just to prove that some ideas appear in many places all at once, Andy Lester explores naming again in O’Reilly Network: The world’s two worst variable names [Mar. 07, 2004]. Apparently, Lester is reviewing the second edition of Code Complete, one of my favorite books on programming, and says there is an entire chapter… Read More »