Setting up a Free/Libre/OSS development environment on Windows is surprisingly easy: all you have to do is mix two or thee ingredients, and add salt to taste.

One of the most-occurring subpatterns I keep running into lately is an event-handling subpattern. I say subpattern because it is not a pattern in and of itself: it can be part of an observer pattern, a state machine, or of any other pattern in which objects that have neither an “is-a” nor an explicit “has-a” [...]

When I ran a team of R&D programmers, a while ago, at one point, we had one person from a visible minority, one person with a slight handicap, two women, two immigrants (one of which was one of the two women, the other was me) and at least one phytopathologist (me). We beat most of [...]

A few days ago, I explained to a colleague why certain communications protocols have a “tell me twice” policy – i.e. to allow for any command to have any effect, the same command – or a command to the same effect – has to be received twice (from the same master). In human parlance, this [...]

"Is Good Code Possible?" John Blanco asks on his blog. He goes on to tell a harrowing story on how he had to develop an iPhone app for a big retailer (“Gorilla Mart”) in less than two weeks. Why he even accepted the contract is beyond me but then, he may not have had a [...]

Coverage profiling allows you to see which parts of the code have been run and are especially useful when unit-testing. Here’s an anecdote to show just how important they can be.

While going through some old code, for another article I’m writing that will come up on the blog, I came across an implementation of binary search in C. While the implementation itself was certainly OK, it wasn’t exactly a general-purpose implementation, so I thought I’d write one and put it on the C++ for the [...]

In the latest installment of my podcast, I asserted that “all software productivity problems are project management problems”. In this post, I will explain why I believe that to be the case and how I think those problems can be resolved.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the “waterfall” software development model, which had been around (with that name) since the 1970s (see, for example, Boehm, B.W. Software engineering. IEEE 7~ans Comput. C-25, (1976), 1226-1241) was starting to be progressively “refined”. When that happens, it usually means that there are problems with the model that [...]

In the “C++ for the self-taught” series, we’re about to embark on a new project. In order to describe that project and in order to figure out what we want the result of that project will be, we will be using a tool called the use-case. So, I think an intermezzo on use-cases is in [...]