Real World Data
When you’re developing an application, it can sometimes be difficult to get data from the real world that matches your data model. Instead, all you are given is a schema or spec for that data an...
Recent Posts
Testing Your Own Code
I’m sure you’ve heard people say that developers are not good at testing their own code. I feel like people believe this to be an axiom; an underlying and fundamental principle of software...
Evaluating Developers
The differences among software developers are much more subtle and detailed than categorizing them as poor, good, great or even rating them on a 1-10 scale. There are plenty of capable developers and ...
Akka! Redux
As predicted, I’ve come down off my Akka-is-the-solution-to-all-of-life’s-problems programmer’s high. Don’t get me wrong. It’s still very slick, and the benefits that you...
Akka!
Every now and again I come across a technology that wows me. I remember being impressed by the Amiga in the 1980s, Lotus AmiPro in the 1990s, and in more recent years, SSDs and Dropbox. For the past w...
Infinite Loops
Entering an infinite loop is one of the worst ways a program can fail. It may not be as insidious as a bug that subtly corrupts data, nor as attention-demanding as an exception being thrown, but like ...
The Value of Expressiveness
I found a threading bug in code I was writing for the hockey management sim I’ve been working on. Or at least, I thought it was a threading bug. I mean, threading is hard, right? As the player p...
Estimates
Estimating tasks is hard to get right. I’ll probably blog about this again in the future, but for now I’m going to give my current thinking. You’ll hear lots of opinions if you talk ...
Doing Things Quickly
At virtually every job I’ve ever had, managers want my tasks done quickly. Yesterday, usually. The faster the better. Sure they pay lip service to making sure that it’s done correctly, but...
Career Strategy
I asked my brother (CTO, Crew) what he thought of my last post, about competitive advantage. He said it was ‘dense’ and asked if I had run it against a program that calculates the grade le...