Business is largely about management which, in turn, is largely about reducing costs and reducing time-to-market. However, today’s management models for human resources are largely based on two things: physical presence in the office and seniority. Performance is often only part of the equation when it comes to promotion – people tend to get promoted [...]

As I said in a previous post, the new economic realities that come with peak oil and climate change will change the way we work and the way the computing industry is run. One of those changes will be limiting unnecessary costs related to moving people around – something we already do for goods.

The difference between references and pointers, what they are w.r.t. pointers and how to handle each has often been the source of confusion, sometimes even for seasoned programmers and often for formally trained, inexperienced programmers. Very often, especially in legacy code, I find one if the ugliest constructs imaginable: a function that returns a reference [...]

By the end of the next decade, there will be no oil left for consumers such as myself and we’ll have reached peak oil. By the end of the decade after that, the last wild polar bear will have drowned because there will be no polar ice left for it to walk on, it will [...]

In any language that supports object-oriented programming, the class is a, if not the, basic building block. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at what a class is, and how that ties in with what we’ve seen in the previous post, data structures, and in the two next posts: pointers, references, objects and [...]