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 [...]

"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.

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.

For the last few weeks, and in the coming months, I’ve had to (and will have to) work with Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server (TFS).

I first started working with SQL several years ago: MySQL was still in the 3.x versions, so I didnt use any stored procs, transactions, etc. Most of the business logic around the data was written in Perl. Though it was a fun time in many respects, I dont miss the limitations of MySQL one bit. [...]

When explaining the design of some application to some-one, I find the use of analogies is one of the best tools available to me – better than diagrams and much better than technical terms: when using technical terms, the listener often starts “glazing over” after only a few seconds – maybe a minute. It really [...]

I just finished debugging a very, very nasty problem, which took me the better part of two hours to find and, once found, only a few minutes to fix. In this case, I have no one to blame but myself, so I really shouldn’t complain too loudly, but I thought it was worth mentioning anyway, [...]

Like a warm spring breeze
writing is to summer’s dawn
as language to dusk

a glass of water
may sometimes have a storm, but
blizzards there are rare