In my last post, I alluded briefly to the concept of “tribal knowledge” when developing software. I’ve heard this term defined in various contexts, but for the sake of discussion here, I’m going to define this as knowledge about how to accomplish a task that is not self-evident or necessarily intuitive. So, for instance, let’s…
I would imagine that most developers reading have heard of code smells. I’ve also seen various references to other concepts such as design smells (which are probably similar to code smells) or process smells. Generally, when you read these, you chuckle or nod in agreement, thinking that you’ve seen them before. For those not familiar…
In an earlier post, I described how one can go about installing a Belkin USB dongle and a very recent version of Ubuntu on a dinosaur PC. Tonight, I’m going to describe a similar thing, except that instead a new piece of hardware, it’s a dinosaur that came with the PC itself. I must admit,…
What Programmers Want In my career, I’ve participated in projects that have run the gamut of degrees of collaboration. That is to say, I’ve written plenty of software on which I served as architect, designer, implementor, tester, and maintainer and I’ve also worked on projects where I was a cog in a much larger effort….
I just finished reading Effective C#: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your C# by Bill Wagner, and thought I’d cover it a bit here. On the whole, I thought that this was an excellent book. It’s quite helpful and interesting, and it provides a nice counterpoint to many technical books in that you have immediate…
