August 2005 Archives
Sara Ford has 5 Tips for surviving as a Tester.
...by Uncle Bob:
"You might find that the XP community is comprised not of a bunch of wild-eyed 'fanatics', but of a group of sincere old-timers who simply want to teach the industry (these kids nowadays!) how to take small, careful steps."
Len Holgate has an excellent post on C++ & memory management (although the following citation sounds quite harsh, there are lots of insightful thoughts in his post):
Memory is only one of the many resources that need to be managed in a program and if you're unable to get your head around memory management then you're unlikely to understand how to manage files, or sockets or database connections or event handles or critical sections...
Having done C & C++ development for almost 20 years now, I would say that memory management is a waste of time for most types of applications. It's just one more thing to worry about and I would prefer not to worry about it (and have the system worry about it for me) and worry about topics closer to the domain instead.
This is really cool: A web application built as a desktop application.
I wonder if this is the dawn of web applications taking over desktop applications for creating cool GUI apps.
...here's a great podcast of Geoffrey Moores keynote at the Open Source Business Conference 2005.
Very worth listening too. Most excellent thoughts. Even if you're not involved with open source at all.
I just listened to it on my new iPod shuffle while driving down highway 280, with cruise control set to 65 :-)
Another post well worth the read: Rules of Success - The Path of Least Resistance.
Here's a most excellent, but rather lengthy essay by Paul Graham on what business can learn from open-source.
Although I would argue about Pauls definition of professionalism, he provides lots of great food for thought.
Omar Shahine has some excellent advice on working at MS.
Of course, his advice can be applied pretty much at any company. I like
- Get out of your office
- Use your product (the one your customers will)
- Fix things that are broken rather than complain about them being broken
- Use the right communication tool for the job
most. Looks like I should finally get my hands on our product and start using it.
There's an interesting experiment at HogBaySoftware running a totally transparent company.
[Update: Both the transparency and customer participation experiment is worth checking out.]
Cedric Beust muses on single-point-of-return functions.
I'm firmly in the single-point-of-return-function camp:
public int dilbert() {
int result = 0;
if (...) {
result = 1;
}
return result;
}
It eliminates an else statement - and I strongly dislike them. Plus I'm dead sure that the return value is initialized at least once with a reasonable return value.
However, as long as the function in question is short, using multiple returns is just fine with me. Of course, it may happen that, while looking at the code, I'll refactor it to a single-point-of-return function. Just because my sub-consciousness makes me do it :-)
Ned Batchelder has some very profound thoughts on Design Patterns as units of computation.
Of course, I'm the very last one to get it, but it looks like yak shaving is a really useful phrase. Seth Godin explain the concept in great detail.
