Programming
« Previous EntriesI listen to Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood on the Stack Overflow Podcast and yell at the radio.
Saturday, September 19th, 2009From comments they’ve made, I’m sure I’m not the only one. Here’s an open letter to them:
Dear Joel and Jeff,
You lauched Server Fault for SysAdmins, but you admit to not knowing that crowd as well as you know the programming crowd. That’s fine. But you need to find someone who does understand that crowd — [...]
Geek Herding
Monday, August 31st, 2009Forgive me reader, for I have sinned. It’s been some time since I last posted to this site.
I haven’t stopped writing, but instead have been trying to ’seed’ my new site with content. There’s only so many words in my head at any one time! Anyway, it’s now ready to be revealed to the world.
A [...]
Announcing a release day before you build
Friday, April 10th, 2009When there’s an idea mooted, a lot needs to be considered before going to market. But if you were to write a detailed spec for everything — including mockups for every screen and functional detail for every action — without discussing the basic concept with every stake holder, you’d often waste a lot of time.
Give Up and Use Tables
Saturday, January 24th, 2009(If you don’t write HTML, you can skip this post. It doesn’t concern you and will just confuse you. Basically: there’s a weird bunch of people who want to avoid a particularly useful way to lay out a web page just because they hold to this notion that “tables are for data”, and the fact [...]
The Black Triangle: A name for the event described by the 80/20 rule
Saturday, January 24th, 2009What Black Triangles can you celebrate this week? When you find one, savor it and celebrate it. Even if nobody else understands.
RSII: An update
Saturday, December 8th, 2007Back on November 7th, I wrote about RSII: Reverse Signatures for Insecure Identification. Since then I’ve discovered http://www.gravatar.com/. It basically implements RSII where your email address is the key and without the theorizing I’ve given to the concept.
My RSII avatar is now also my gravatar, and it’s let me add my other email addresses to [...]
If programmers built planes
Friday, November 9th, 2007I just stumbled across this video on YouTube that’s supposed to be an advertisement for some business management rubbish but, ignoring that, is a great analogy of modern programming (lack of) principles:
Most of today’s online development work is build-it-as-you-fly. Even with passengers on board.
In the early days when the plane is just flyable but has [...]
Measham’s Law: Godwin’s Law for Open Source development
Thursday, October 11th, 2007Godwin’s Law states:
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
I now introduce Measham’s Law:
As an online discussion regarding the features of a piece of open source software grows longer, the probability of someone saying “It’s open source, you write it” approaches one.
Sausage damnit!
Friday, September 21st, 2007The term ‘bacn’ was coined by the folks at PodCamp Pittsburgh and is on the rise as a term for email that isn’t spam, but it isn’t ham. PodCamp considers email notifications from Facebook, Jaiku, Flickr, etc. to be ‘bacn’. You want to get the notificiations so it isn’t spam. But then, the messages aren’t [...]
Javascript Color picker
Thursday, June 29th, 2006Having seen various color pickers that ask you to click on a tiny sample to select a color, I decided it was time to do something more useful. First I wrote color.js, a library for creating, converting and using colors in various ways. Then I got my scrollcontrol.js that uses a scrollbar to select a [...]
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