Archive for the 'coding' Category

To fire, or not to fire, ‘workaholics’…

Friday, March 7th, 2008

Greetings,
There’s an interesting few blog posts going on about folks who work really hard. It started from Jason Calacanis’s article of tips on how to save money when running a startup (many of which are good, but #11 is ‘Fire people who are not workaholics…’) and that was picked up at the 37signals SvN […]

TDD: The ‘Logans Run’ of Software Development…

Friday, October 5th, 2007

Greetings,
I want to start by making it clear that I know why testing is good, and that it’s really important, but I think that the TDD proponents are glossing over the most difficult part of a project.
I would very much like someone to address the issue of modifying code that is not new, and not […]

JBidwatcher 1.0.1 is released

Sunday, April 29th, 2007

Greetings,
I’ve put up the latest version, 1.0.1 of JBidwatcher.  It’s mainly a bug fix release.  It includes a few new features towards better documentation, error messages, and recognition of eBay states, and a new (still completely optional) approach to the eBay affiliate idea.
One of the important fixes has to do with a wording change; eBay […]

Hackety Hack!

Friday, April 27th, 2007

Greetings,
Programming should be fun, it’s what gets us programmers into it in the first place, and it’s what keeps us going at it.
Too many layers have been heaped on programming these days; most IDEs are oppressive, process-oriented beasts.
I, and many other programmers, have been concerned about how the next generation of programmers are going to […]

JBidwatcher and CyberFOX status update

Tuesday, February 13th, 2007

Greetings,
A concerned user recently asked me how I was doing in the aftermath of the issue with eBay sales of JBidwatcher, specifically:
You seemed pretty depressed about it in your post to the website.
I was.
There was a really bad week there, while I was dealing with all of it, back and forth, and just feeling like […]

Pick your need, pick your tool.

Tuesday, January 9th, 2007

Greetings,
I had a friend recently who asked about what programming languages they should learn. He primarily works as a system and network administrator, and had been bombarded by ‘Learn Ruby!’ from a bunch of evangelists recently. I assured him it wasn’t necessary, and came up with this interesting list.
What language you work in […]

Seattle MindCamp 2.0

Saturday, April 29th, 2006

Greetings,
Wooof… Well, MindCamp2.0 is a minute away from opening up, theoretically, and I’m about 30 minutes away from being there.
I’m really hoping this lets me immerse myself in a crowd of very smart people thinking about cool stuff, so that I can kick-start my own brain cells into working a bit better on my […]

Work/Life Balance versus The Passion of the Code.

Friday, December 23rd, 2005

Greetings,
Robert Scoble takes Mark Lucovsky to task over seeing passion in Google workers sticking around until all hours of the night.
This is a hard thing to explain if you haven’t been there. I’ve been there twice, once with McAfee Associates, in full-bore, turbo-charged engineer mode, fighting against the world-wide virus writing epidemic in the […]

Thoughts on remote diff…

Friday, November 11th, 2005

Greetings,
I sat in my office today, listening to a phone interview in which the candidate was asked a number of simple problems, and then the harder design question:
Given two computers linked over a slow link (say dialup), each has a 1TB file, how would you determine (1) if the two are different, and (2) what […]