Joel Spolsky recently wrote about the “Duct Tape Programmer“: Duct tape programmers are pragmatic. Zawinski popularized Richard Gabriel’s precept of Worse is Better. A 50%-good solution that people actually have solves more problems and survives longer than a 99% solution that nobody has because it’s…
Not so long ago, an acquaintance who was seeking a software development job interviewed for a role at a “market leader” in the development, implementation and support of financial services software. During the interview, it was revealed that the position is concentrated around the implementation of an Enterprise…
A lot of programmers haven’t heard of _why. Well I certainly didn’t, up until a few months ago, when I started following some of his projects. _why was a prolific programmer, writer, and artist, best known for his work on Ruby. Intriguingly, _why’s online…
What makes a programmer good at their craft? For years, organizations which hire programmers have reasoned with this question. Yet, the criteria for selection of a “good” programmer differs by the lot. As candidates, most programmers are put through tough technical interviews, grinding analytical tests, and twisted coding…
It’s a known assertion that software applications (desktop or distributed) are not truly platform agnostic. Even if a software application is developed as a cross-platform solution, it is very difficult to make it look and work identically across all platforms (operating systems). Hence, lately I’ve been…
Long story short. Today I was having some trouble with one of my email addresses. I raised a support request with the hosting provider. Within a few minutes, their technical support person replied back telling me that nothing is wrong at their end. And then, soon after, the problem was…
The other day I wrote down this Haiku out of disappointment: With a necktie in January: Erratic spacing at the end of lines Heedless programmer continues to code Disappointment that came from recently inspecting gallons of ruthlessly written source code. The business logic, coding standards, and refactoring aside; I was…
I’ve been reading a lot about “Augmented Reality” lately. Just the other day, I saw this beautiful short film titled ‘World Builder‘, that also depicts this powerful holographic technology to express the fusion of the physical and virtual worlds. Augmented Reality (AR) is basically…