24 Mar 2010 The Opposite of Fitts' Law If you've ever wrangled a user interface, you've probably heard of Fitts' Law. It's pretty simple – the larger an item is, and the closer it is to your cursor, the easier it is to click on. Kevin Hale put together a great visual summary of Fitts' Law, so rather than over-explain it, I'll refer you there. The short version of Fitts' law, to save you all that t

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

24 Jun 2009 The iPhone Software Revolution The original iPhone was for suckers hard-core gadget enthusiasts only. But as I predicted, 12 months later, the iPhone 3G rectified all the shortcomings of the first version. And now, with the iPhone 3GS, we've reached the mythical third version: A computer industry adage is that Microsoft does not make a successful product until version 3. Its Windows op

10 Mar 2009 Sharpening the Saw As a software developer, how do you sharpen your saw? Sharpening the saw is shorthand for anything you do that isn't programming, necessarily, but (theoretically) makes you a better programmer. It's derived from the Covey book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. There's a guy who stumbled into a lumberjack in the mountains. The man stops to observe the lumberjac

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

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

02 Feb 2009 Mixing Oil and Water: Authorship in a Wiki World When you visit Wikipedia's entry on asphalt, you get some reasonably reliable information about asphalt. What you don't get, however, is any indication of who the author is. That's because the author is irrelevant. Wikipedia is a community effort, the result of tiny slices of effort contributed by millions of people around the world. The

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

19 Jan 2009 A Visit With Alan Kay Alan Kay is one of my computing heroes. All this stuff we do every day as programmers? Kay had a hand in inventing a huge swath of it: Computer scientist Kay was the leader of the group that invented object-oriented programming, the graphical user interface, 3D computer graphics, and ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet So as you might imagine, I was pretty th

08 Jan 2009 Overnight Success: It Takes Years Paul Buchheit, the original lead developer of GMail, notes that the success of GMail was a long time in coming: We starting working on Gmail in August 2001. For a long time, almost everyone disliked it. Some people used it anyway because of the search, but they had endless complaints. Quite a few people thought that we should kill the project, or perha

18 Dec 2008 Hardware is Cheap, Programmers are Expensive Given the rapid advance of Moore's Law, when does it make sense to throw hardware at a programming problem? As a general rule, I'd say almost always. Consider the average programmer salary here in the US: You probably have several of these programmer guys or gals on staff. I can't speak to how much your servers may cost, or how many of them

15 Dec 2008 Easy, Efficient Hi-Def Video Playback Ever since creating my first home theater PC, I've archived my Netflix rental DVDs to files on the hard drive. I don't do this because I want to rip off the movie industry; I do it for convenience. It's easier to deal with a collection of digital files than it is to deal with a bunch of shiny, easily scratched plastic discs. Nor do I keep the movie

11 Dec 2008 Profitable Until Deemed Illegal I was fascinated to discover the auction hybrid site swoopo.com (previously known as telebid.com). It's a strange combination of eBay, woot, and slot machine. Here's how it works: You purchase bids in pre-packaged blocks of at least 30. Each bid costs you 75 cents, with no volume discount. Each bid raises the purchase price by 15 cents and increases the