software development

How Many Hours Can a Programmer Program?

January 5, 2012

I am a little late to this party where Michael Arrington says that startups mean working hard and sleeping under your desk. But I will add a few words. I read a lot of commentary about how such death marches can be counter-productive and ultimately unsuccessful, and also the real dangers they pose to the […]

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The Resistance Against Requirements Specifications

November 21, 2011

Martin Fowler re-posted this article from 2004: Tests are always going to be incomplete, so they always have to be backed up with other mechanisms. Being the twisted mind that I am, I actually see this as a plus. Since it’s clear that Specification By Example isn’t enough, it’s clear that you need to do […]

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Recommendation Engines

October 9, 2011

I just finished reading “Collective Intelligence in Action”, a book by Satyam Alag about using information from user actions to improve the working and usability of applications. This is a field that has seen much interest in recent years given that most web applications, especially Web 2.0 apps, have massive amounts of data flowing through […]

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Making Time for Hobby Programming

September 22, 2011

I noticed a couple of comments on DZone about programmers with family not having the time to do hobby projects. As I wrote about my own experiences having a child, I really empathize with such concerns. It is not easy. It is really hard to do a fair job with your parenting and family responsibilities […]

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Software Development While Having a Child

September 18, 2011

One thing that always seems to come up when discussing about programming outside of work is the question of what to do when you have a family? Don’t you have responsibilities towards your spouse and children? Don’t they deserve your time? Can you simply lock the door to your home office room and ignore everything […]

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Passionate Programming versus Caring Programming

September 13, 2011

Oren Eini (aka Ayende @ Rahien) replies to a job seeker who doesn’t have any source code outside of work: Put simply, we are looking for a .NET developer and one of the most important things that we look for is passion. In general, we have found that people that care and are interested in […]

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Becoming a Great Programmer

September 8, 2011

On the lines of Peter Norvig’s article about teaching yourself programming in 10 years, Mike Lewis (“Apoch”) writes a nice post about how to become a good programmer in just six “simple” steps: Get in it for the long haul. Write Lots of Code. Read Even More Code. Learn Many Languages. Master a Couple. Create a Language. Learn […]

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Why Single Identity for Authentication is an Impossible Dream

September 6, 2011

Jeff Atwood once again points us to the Internet nightmare of maintaining several passwords for logging into so many different websites. Every time you touch a website that actually cares who the heck you are — and this is an increasingly large list of sites as the web matures — you have to, sigh, “log […]

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Form Follows Function — True for Podcasts Also

August 21, 2011

It was interesting to read this postmortem of a mistake made by Rob Conery in releasing a sub-standard podcast. You might think he is making too much of a small error, but I understand the feeling. I feel stupid when I publish a post and later notice that I had left a spelling or grammar […]

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The Allure of PHP

August 10, 2011

Hush, Cédric Beust just admitted he likes PHP. He cites the following reasons: PHP is like C PHP never let me down PHP is robust PHP’s documentation is great Universal support High reward I agree with him mostly, except for the “robustness” part. Cedric, being a better programmer, might have got perfectly working code. But my guess is that […]

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