If you haven't been able to keep up with my blistering pace of one blog post per year, I don't blame you. There's a lot going on right now. It's a busy time. But let's pause and take a moment to celebrate that Elon Musk destroyed Twitter. I can't possibly say it better than Paul Ford so I'll just refer you there: Every five or six minutes, someone in the social sciences publishes a PDF with a titl

18 Jul 2009 Software Engineering: Dead? I was utterly floored when I read this new IEEE article by Tom DeMarco (pdf). See if you can tell why. My early metrics book, Controlling Software Projects: Management, Measurement, and Estimates [1986], played a role in the way many budding software engineers quantified work and planned their projects. In my reflective mood, I'm wondering, was its advice co

06 Jul 2009 Code: It's Trivial Remember that Stack Overflow thing we've been working on? Some commenters on a recent Hacker News article questioned the pricing of Stack Exchange -- essentially, a hosted Stack Overflow: Seems really pricey for a relatively simple software like this. Someone write an open source alternative? it looks like something that can be thrown together in a weekend. Ah, yes,

21 Apr 2009 A Modest Proposal for the Copy and Paste School of Code Reuse Is copying and pasting code dangerous? Should control-c and control-v be treated not as essential programming keyboard shortcuts, but registered weapons? (yes, I know that in OS X, the keyboard shortcut for cut and paste uses "crazy Prince symbol key" instead of control, like God intended. Any cognitive dissonance you may be

25 Feb 2009 Who's Your Coding Buddy? I am continually amazed how much better my code becomes after I've had a peer look at it. I don't mean a formal review in a meeting room, or making my code open to anonymous public scrutiny on the internet, or some kind of onerous pair programming regime. Just one brief attempt at explaining and showing my code to a fellow programmer – that's usually all it tak

18 Feb 2009 Are You An Expert? I think I have a problem with authority. Starting with my own. It troubles me greatly to hear that people see me as an expert or an authority, and not a fellow amateur. If I've learned anything in my career, it is that approaching software development as an expert, as someone who has already discovered everything there is to know about a given topic, is the one sures

25 Nov 2007 The Two Types of Programmers Contrary to myth, there aren't fourteen types of programmers. There are really only two, as Ben Collins-Sussman reminds us. There are two "classes" of programmers in the world of software development: I'm going to call them the 20% and the 80%. The 20% folks are what many would call "alpha" programmers -- the leaders, trailblazers, trendsetters, the kind of

11 Feb 2009 The Ferengi Programmer There was a little brouhaha recently about some comments Joel Spolsky made on our podcast: Last week I was listening to a podcast on Hanselminutes, with Robert Martin talking about the SOLID principles. (That's a real easy-to-Google term!) It's object-oriented design, and they're calling it agile design, which it really, really isn't. It's principles for how to d

07 Feb 2009 Don't Reinvent The Wheel, Unless You Plan on Learning More About Wheels The introduction to Head First Design Patterns exhorts us not to reinvent the wheel: You're not alone. At any given moment, somewhere in the world someone struggles with the same software design problems you have. You know you don't want to reinvent the wheel (or worse, a flat tire), so you look to Design Patterns

29 Jan 2009 The Sad Tragedy of Micro-Optimization Theater I'll just come right out and say it: I love strings. As far as I'm concerned, there isn't a problem that I can't solve with a string and perhaps a regular expression or two. But maybe that's just my lack of math skills talking. In all seriousness, though, the type of programming we do on Stack Overflow is intimately tied to strings. We're c

22 Jan 2009 Open Source Software, Self Service Software Have you ever used those self-service checkout machines at a grocery store or supermarket? What fascinates me about self-service checkout devices is that the store is making you do work they would normally pay their employees to do. Think about this for a minute. You're playing the role of the paying customer and the cashier employee. Under t