Coding Horror: Tending Your Software Garden (6)
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Jeff Atwood (13)
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Coding Horror (19)
1 day, 21 hours
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Software: do you write it like a book, grow it like a plant, accrete it like a pearl, or construct it like a building? As Steve McConnell notes in Code Complete 2, there's no shortage of software development metaphors: A confusing abundance of metaphors has grown up around software development. David Gries says writing software is a science (1981). Donald Knuth says it's an art (1998). Watts Humphrey says it's a process (1989). P. J. ...
Podcast #31 (2)
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Jeff Atwood (13)
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Blog - Stack Overflow (0)
5 days, 19 hours
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This is the thirty-first episode of the StackOverflow podcast, where Joel and Jeff discuss.. stuff! Based on some comments from Podcast #30, we now know that “Learning about NP-Completeness from Jeff is like learning about irony from Alanis Morissette”. It’s funny because it’s true! It was also noted that “[Jeff] certainly no mathematician.” In my defense, I’ve always been very open about my lack of math skills. It’s even item #3 in my Five Things ...
Is Email = Efail? (57)
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Jeff Atwood (13)
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Coding Horror (19)
1 week
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While I've always practiced reasonable email hygiene, for the last 6 months I've been in near-constant email bankruptcy mode. This concerns me. Yes, it's partly my fault for being a world champion procrastinator, but I'm not sure it's entirely my fault. There are forces at work here, factors that easily outstrip the efforts of any one measly human being, no matter how tenacious and dogged. Or, as in my case, no matter how lazy. I've ...
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Tom said:
"The blanket equation of email with failure is strong language indeed, but it's a serious problem. The intrinsically low effort-to-reward ratio of private email is not necessarily a new idea; as I said in When In Doubt, Make It Public, it's almost never in anyone's best interest to keep their communications locked into private silos of any kind, email or otherwise. Why answer one person's email directly when I could potentially answer a thousand different people's email with a single blog post?"so true! this is why i love bcc so much!
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Ryan Joseph said:
Email requires more of an interface cognitive load tax than instant messaging. People naturally put much more into an email, perhaps in an unconscious effort to amortize that email interface tax overhead across more content. People feel that since they are already "bothering" to write an email, they might as well take the time to go into all kinds of detail, perhaps even adding a few more things that they're thinking about.
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Daniel J. Pritchett said:
I never get tired of reading anti-email articles! "What we can to combat the email = efail problem? Take Tantek's advice: whenever possible, avoid sending email. Not because we don't want to communicate with our peers. Quite the contrary. We should avoid sending email out of a deep respect for our peers -- so that they are free to communicate as effectively and as often as possible with us."
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L'oracolo said:
L'e-mail è diventata un mezzo di comunicazione pesante - in una e-mail vogliamo essere più esaustivi che in un messaggio, finiamo per trattare troppi argomenti in parallelo e dopo un certo numero di "botta e risposta" andare avanti diventa un compito estremamente gravoso... se moltiplichiamo il tempo richiesto per il numero di potenziali corrispondenti, otteniamo qualcosa di davvero ingestibile.
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Jesper Lind said:
EMAIL shall henceforth be known as EFAIL. - http://twitter.com/t/statuses/724032562
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Shoshannah F said:
אני מזדהה עם הבעייה, אבל אני לא בטוחה שאני מסכימה עם הפתרון המוצע
Stack Overflow Is You (3)
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Jeff Atwood (13)
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1 week, 1 day
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I was surprised to find the following question on Stack Overflow: Jon Skeet Facts Apparently this “question” is.. somewhat controversial; as of now it has 31 revisions and 65 comments. It was opened by Bill the Lizard, who accepted this answer, from Jon Skeet, appropriately enough: These are written in the third person so as not to disrupt the style of the thing. But hey, as we all know, Jon Skeet can make 1 == ...
Can You Really Rent a Coder? (35)
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Jeff Atwood (13)
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Coding Horror (19)
1 week, 2 days
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I've been a fan of Dan Appleman for about as long as I've been a professional programmer. He is one of my heroes. Unfortunately, Dan only blogs rarely, so I was heartened to see a spate of recent blog updates from him. One of the entries asks a question I've often wondered myself: can you really rent a coder? Over the past year or two I've kept an eye on the various online consulting sites ...
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Devlin D said:
I too see a lot of problems with this model. Outsourcing is tough enough even for the biggest companies. Doing it in such an informal way and on the cheap can only be asking for trouble.
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Tom said:
good anti-ferris content.
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Chris Charabaruk said:
I've never met a coder rental site that I've liked. Jeff hits it on the head, but yeah, those third world under-bidders just ruin it for the rest of us.
codinghorror: @hotdogsladies are you besmirching the good name of Dippin' Dots®, The Ice Cream of The Future™ ? (1)
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codinghorror: Every time I use the word "ironically" I have to stop and make sure I'm using it correctly. I blame you, Alanis Morissette. (1)
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codinghorror: why does my beloved soda pop come in 8-packs instead of 12-packs now? This is unacceptable. I hate and fear change. (1)
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codinghorror: "I wish I had two brains so I could hate twice as efficiently." (1)
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Coding Horror: That's Not a Bug, It's a Feature Request (65)
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Jeff Atwood (13)
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Coding Horror (19)
1 week, 6 days
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For as long as I've been a software developer and used bug tracking systems, we have struggled with the same fundamental problem in every single project we've worked on: how do you tell bugs from feature requests? Sure, there are some obvious crashes that are clearly bugs. But that's maybe 10% of what you deal with on a daily basis, and the real killer showstopper bugs -- the ones that prevent normal usage of the ...
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Devlin D said:
This post couldn't be more bang on. This is what I deal with every single day...not that it's a bad thing.
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Brandon Bloom said:
I quoted the part of the article worth reading (the rest is long and rambling). I agree with this article 100%
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sameer said:
And here's the funny thing, from my own personal experiences. Bug tracking is a lot like maintaining a TODO list, GTD style. If only we had a 10-minute rule in the industry (If what's coming in can be resolved in 10 minutes or less, just freaking resolve it), we'd spend way lesser time determining buckets and would have way lesser bugs/feature requests in our trackers.
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Aℓf said:
But the question remains: is this a bug, or a feature request?
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Sandra said:
the battle of the Bug vs. Feature Request.Good observation. Though Jeff Atwood doesn't provide a solution really.
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Maurice said:
Amen
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James Socol said:
There's a long rant in the middle of this you can skip, but the overall point is very good.
We Are Typists First, Programmers Second (111)
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Jeff Atwood (13)
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Coding Horror (19)
2 weeks, 1 day
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Remember last week when I said coding was just writing? I was wrong. As one commenter noted, it's even simpler than that. [This] reminds me of a true "Dilbert moment" a few years ago, when my (obviously non-technical) boss commented that he never understood why it took months to develop software. "After all", he said, "it's just typing." Like broken clocks, even pointy-haired managers are right once a day. Coding is just typing. So if ...
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Davide Mirtillo aka D4rKr0W said:
Tutti a fare un corso di dattilografia, subito!
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felix said:
This always confused me, too. It just was wierd to see hunt and peckers at the keyboard. Just took his test - 90wpm, no mistakes. I know several people who kill that.
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jerobins said:
i am so thankful that i took typing in HS; only guy in the class at the time.
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Michael said:
towards the end: "Don't just type random gibberish as fast as you can on the screen, unless you're a Perl programmer."
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Casey said:
This. This is why I stopped reading Coding Horror.
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Olly Headey said:
I hit 80wpm on that first test... not bad but too many hits on the backspace key
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Devlin D said:
Im no typist by any stretch of the imagination, but after hours of coding at a time over a number of years how could anyone still be a "hunt and pecker"?
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John said:
Hmmm... 64 wpm with 5 mistakes (on my second attempt). Apparently I'm a bit rusty. (Took typing in high school.)
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mernisse said:
*snicker* "Yes, you should think about what you're doing, obviously. Don't just type random gibberish as fast as you can on the screen, unless you're a Perl programmer", also:Your speed was: 71wpm.You made 2 mistakes,
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Riyaz Mohammed Ibrahim said:
Great, ya i do agreen
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Derek Morrison said:
I just don't like this post. It's not like being a better typist automatically makes you a better developer. Plus, with the hand pain I have now, I need to type as little as possible.
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Daniel J. Pritchett said:
"What I'm trying to say is this: speed matters. When you're a fast, efficient typist, you spend less time between thinking that thought and expressing it in code. Which means, if you're me at least, that you might actually get some of your ideas committed to screen before you completely lose your train of thought. Again."
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Mark Trapp said:
72 WPM. I'm terrible.
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Tim said:
"Don't just type random gibberish as fast as you can on the screen, unless you're a Perl programmer" -- That's completely badass, I love it :)
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samgrover said:
I followed the link to the typing test and found my speed to be a horrible 37 wpm without mistakes.
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April Russo said:
Coder's quote of the week: 'Don't just type random gibberish as fast as you can on the screen, unless you're a Perl programmer.'
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Dedalus said:
Only 50 wpm (with a few bursts), but thank you, Mavis Beacon on a free floppy that came with a magazine some 15 years ago...
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Kishore Balakrishnan said:
typing programming
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Steve Kaiser said:
While I don't think touch-typing is for everyone, it's excruciating to watch someone hunt and peck, and KNOW their fingers are the bottleneck.
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adapar said:
"Don't just type random gibberish as fast as you can on the screen, unless you're a Perl programmer" Ha!
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el-such-n-such said:
busted again... the wood shed is a lonely place, time to brush up on my typing...
codinghorror: did you ever feel like your made up, misheard lyrics are somehow better than the actual song lyrics? me too, man. (1)
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Your Favorite NP-Complete Cheat (73)
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Jeff Atwood (13)
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Coding Horror (19)
2 weeks, 4 days
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Ever heard a software engineer refer to a problem as "NP-complete"? NP-complete is fancy computer science jargon shorthand for "incredibly hard": The most notable characteristic of NP-complete problems is that no fast solution to them is known; that is, the time required to solve the problem using any currently known algorithm increases very quickly as the size of the problem grows. As a result, the time required to solve even moderately large versions of many ...
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peteresch said:
What do expert programmers do when faced by an intractable problem? They cheat.
Coding Horror: Stop Me If You Think You've Seen This Word Before (47)
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Jeff Atwood (13)
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Coding Horror (19)
2 weeks, 6 days
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If you've ever searched for anything, you've probably run into stop words. Stop words are words so common they are typically ignored for search purposes. That is, if you type in a stop word as one of your search terms, the search engine will ignore that word (if it can). If you attempt to search using nothing but stop words, the search engine will throw up its hands and tell you to try again. Seems ...
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Toby said:
Interesting read for those not familiar with NLP problems.
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Matt McKnight said:
a good trade-off to consider. a good background move would be to transparently try to turn stop words into n-grams or phrases.
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David Damen said:
Stop words... That most devious of search terms... or not?
Podcast #29 (2)
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Jeff Atwood (13)
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2 weeks, 6 days
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This is the twenty-ninth episode of the StackOverflow podcast, wherein Joel and I discuss the following: The downside of being a PC gamer: it’s prime game release season. My productivity last week was nil due to the release of Fallout 3, as I discuss on my blog. But it was totally worth it. One videogame cliche is the levels filled with random barrels and crates as filler. The classic game site Old Man Murray used ...
Feeding My Graphics Card Addiction (19)
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Jeff Atwood (13)
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Coding Horror (19)
3 weeks, 1 day
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Hello, my name is Jeff Atwood, and I'm an addict. I'm addicted... to video cards. In fact, I've been addicted since 1996. Well, maybe a few years earlier than that if you count some of the classic 2D accelerators. But the true fascination didn't start until 1996, when the first consumer hardware 3D accelerators came to market. I followed their development avidly in newsgroups, and tried desperately to be the first kid on my block ...
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Denny said:
I designed ASICs in Verilog for four years, can solder fine pitch PGA chips, and I now write assembly code for a living. But I'm a Mac user, so that makes me a knuckle-dragger compared to the PC modder who can cut away a fan grill with a dremel. KTHXBAI!
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Tim said:
"knuckle-dragging Mac users", this is good stuff :)
Guitar Hero World Tour vs. Real Drums (1)
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Jeff Atwood (13)
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Fake Plastic Rock (0)
3 weeks, 1 day
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Not much to say about this one — a side by side video of a gentleman playing the Tool song “Parabola” on the GH:WT drums, and a real world drumset. Note that the real drumkit illustrates some of the limitations of the 2 cymbal / 3 pad layout of the GH:WT drums, as I’ve previously discussed. I count 5 cymbals in his drumkit! Here’s a photo I found of a “typical” drumset layout. Note that ...
Coding Horror: Coding: It's Just Writing (80)
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