In almost every field, people will grab onto some belief without any (rational) reason. Programmers often act and seem to believe that they are actually rational people and would not hold an irrational belief (at least where our field is concerned). When you look at your fellow developers, you can usually spot counter-examples. Like many… Read More »
A recent article ‘Real’ Programming Is an Elitist Myth hit a couple of points that I have been explaining to people for years. Although the author makes a few interesting points, he misses several more. The author describes a system written using a “database as a service” system with little to no code, that solves… Read More »
Long ago when I began programming, most programs were standalone executables. Back in those days, almost all programs were run from a command line or executed by clicking on an icon on a GUI. This was before the web existed and most people didn’t even have dial-up access. Things are very different today, with many… Read More »
The writing of standalone tools is an underappreciated part of software development.
I recently ran across the article Why use Vim: Forget easy-to-use design. Choose something hard instead — Quartz. This article suggests that you should learn to use the vim editor because it’s hard. Although I do think most developers would benefit from using an editor like vim, I feel like the because it’s hard advice… Read More »
This is another post in my intermittent series of Best Practices Gone Bad (BPGB) Today, we are going to take another side-step into version control. Most development groups use version control of some form. Whether you prefer Subversion, Git, Mercurial, Bazaar, Clear Case, or any of the many others, version control is an important technique… Read More »
The past few generations of version control systems have really good support for branching. This feature allows someone to create a new line of development that is separate from the official main/master/trunk line of development. Changes made on a branch do not affect the main development until they are merged to the main branch. Shortly… Read More »
Despite the press in recent years asserting the software development is always a team activity, there are still individual programmers building software without help from others. I’ve recently had a question from one such individual asking if version control makes sense for a developer working alone. Despite working in teams for years, I also work… Read More »
Despite being convinced that we are rational people, many programmers or software types can be rabid about our favorite technologies. If you want to hear a passionate opinion, ask about favorite programming editor, programming language, or operating system. If you want to start a fight, suggest that the preference is not an objective decision. That… Read More »
Back in February, I ran across the post robkinyon on Perl: How useful is a debugger, really? and was again reminded of the great debugging debate. I thought about commenting on it at the time, but I got distracted. Well, Matt Trout reminded me of it again today with his post Simple Debugging. So, I… Read More »