Codin'

Max Barry on risk

One of my favourite authors, Max Barry, talks about different types of risk and how the idea of a no risk possibility makes it harder to tell big risks from little ones
Published in Codin' on Saturday, August 1st, 2009

Programming truth

Leon is on form today :D “Given a sufficiently large framework, any application can be a one-liner” Read the rest of the post for the really great follow up comments.
Published in Codin' on Thursday, May 15th, 2008

My bad dev singing tapes

I spent a bit of time last weekend tagging some of my old articles. I was a bit gratified looking through the old stuff and realising how far my skills have come since I started in August 2004. I noticed that a lot of the things I blogged about then were things are so second [...]
Published in Codin' on Saturday, May 10th, 2008

Trust noone (when debugging)

Yesterday I was reminded of one of the most important things I learnt at uni: trust nothing when debugging. It was my second year of uni (see nerdy Helen on her first day of uni to set the scene) and I had to write a simple language parser in a language called Haskell. I had gotten [...]
Published in Codin' on Saturday, October 13th, 2007

Thank you oh great software for allowing me the privilege of using you

One of the little things that always annoys me when I read stuff about software is seeing a phrase like “this software allows the user to do [x]” as if the almighty software was somehow granting the mere user a special favour to do something on the software’s machine. It annoys me firstly because *I* [...]
Published in Codin' on Saturday, January 20th, 2007

Joel on software link list

Joel’s got a new thing linked from his site where the people who read his site can post links to interesting things on the internet. Everyone who visits can post things and rate the things that other people post. The top rated links are always changing and actually pretty cool so if you have some [...]
Published in Codin' on Friday, March 31st, 2006

Model driven development interview on .NET rocks

They had a very interesting interview of a guy called Chris Sells on the .NET rocks podcast. He was talking about a model driven way of developing software that (as I understood it) was about being able to tell the computer what you want it to do without needing to tell it how to do [...]
Published in Codin' on Monday, January 16th, 2006

WinMerge

I found a pretty nice free diff tool for windows called WinMerge. It’s not very pretty to look at, but it had a pretty clear interface that made differences in files pretty easy to spot. I also found quite a nice shareware version a while back called CompareIt that was a bit prettier to look at, [...]
Published in Codin' on Thursday, November 10th, 2005

Where are the UK start ups?

I’ve been quite chatty today after a few weeks of blog silence, but I really, really wanted to keep a bookmark to this lovely post about why there are no start ups in the UK. The follow up comments suggest that there are indeed start ups in the UK if you know where to look [...]
Published in Codin' on Monday, October 17th, 2005

It's like Flickr for code!

I think this snippets site I found today is a pretty cool idea. You can add little snippets of code to this page, tag them and then have them available for eternity on the internet. You can also search other people’s snippets to see if anyone else has run into your obscure problem getting the [...]
Published in Codin' on Monday, October 17th, 2005

An office with a door.. I can't imagine it

Joel talks again about how he thinks every programmer should have their own office with a door. I can’t actually imagine having my own office. I’m up to desk number four in my working life and they’ve all been in open plan offices. I can definitely see the benefits of being able to shut the [...]
Published in Codin' on Monday, October 17th, 2005

Joel discusses why quality programmers are a good investment

Joel says you should hire good programmers to make your software because Brad Pitt is so hot. Being a programmer myself (and someone who went to see the recent Brad Pitt movie “Troy” because I thought he looked hot running around in greek gear) I like this line of reasoning. Brad Pitt aside, I think it’s [...]
Published in Codin' on Tuesday, July 26th, 2005

Making it easy to spot mistakes

I just read an interesting article by Joel about writing code that makes it easy to spot mistakes. The thing I like about his article was the bit about liking things that assumed human programmers are infallible and things that make mistakes easy to spot are a Good Thing. That’s what I’ve always liked about using [...]
Published in Codin' on Sunday, May 15th, 2005

Learning to use hungarian notation

I thought I’d look up Hungarian Notation because today because I want to make the code samples I’ve been writing as easy for VB.NET programmers to read as possible. I’ve never liked hungarian notation because I think it makes code harder to read, so I’m quite glad that it’s no longer microsoft standard. I think the [...]
Published in Codin' on Thursday, April 7th, 2005

Developers vs programmers

I like this: “You can’t eliminate problems, but you can make trades to get problems that you prefer over the ones you have now.” :) It’s from an interesting article about Developers vs programmers which is interesting because it contains a definition of developer I hadn’t considered before. I’d actually say that being a developer rather [...]
Published in Codin' on Wednesday, February 23rd, 2005

I hate enterprise manager

And speaking of interfaces.. anyone who makes the last menu item of the context menu you get when you right click on a program in the task bar anything but “close” should have their UI designing privledges revoked. As should the person who put “power” and “sleep” buttons on my keyboard right under “end” and [...]
Published in Codin' on Monday, February 21st, 2005

Mavens and mums: the problem of interface design

Interesting article about Maven traps. The theory goes that mavens are people that other people ask opinions about things. For example I’m going to buy a new car in a couple of weeks and I know pretty much nothing about cars, so I ask a family friend for advice about the car I’m thinking of [...]
Published in Codin' on Sunday, February 20th, 2005

Building a data access layer

One of the really significant changes I’ve made to the web project I’ve been working on for the past six months has been seperating all of the data access code into a data access layer that the other parts of the application can only access through interface classes that I’ve called datasources. I’ve set it [...]
Published in Codin' on Tuesday, February 15th, 2005

Designing Object-oriented Tiered applications

Saw a link to a really interesting article on the Code Project this morning called Introduction to Object-Oriented Tiered Application Design. It gave a good overview on the reasoning behind building multi-tiered applications, explained the usual tiers people tend to use and gave some examples of the type of application that the development pattern is [...]
Published in Codin' on Tuesday, February 8th, 2005

Refactoring

After spending the afternoon rewriting some web components that have been quietly festering for some months I’ve come to the conclusion that refactoring is a lot like being honest with people: it gets harder the longer you leave it and ultimately it’s neccessary for the health of the system. :)
Published in Codin' on Friday, February 4th, 2005

Bug tracking software

I’ve tried text files, post-it notes, handwritten to-do lists, directories in my email and excel spreadsheets to track the feature requests, bugs and progress of my current project. I’ve decided it’s time to move into the 21st century and install some proper, multi-user bug tracking software. I asked on the MSWebDev group and got a few [...]
Published in Codin' on Wednesday, January 26th, 2005

Interesting links for friday

Wish it was my job to just read interesting technical articles all day.. :) What I really am trying to answer is the much more mundance question about why IE is throwing a hissy fit over my XML document’s encoding. Martin Fowler on design patterns for the wiring of components.
Published in Codin' on Friday, December 10th, 2004

Rockstars and compliance monkeys

Very interesting article on Joel’s site about the problems about software methodologies and team dynamics. The article can be summed up by the following: “methodologies encourage rock stars to become compliance monkeys, and I need everyone on my team to be a rock star”. His main argument is that methodologies can discounrage innovation and taking iniative. I [...]
Published in Codin' on Tuesday, December 7th, 2004

Painters and hackers

Been reading about hackers and painters.. are we revolutionaries? I think I perhaps prefer the phrase “builders of beautiful things”. Revolutionary sounds a little too much like the propaganda from the Pirates of silicon valley. Maybe my problem is that to aspire to be a revolutionary is to aspire to be noticed by society, while [...]
Published in Codin' on Friday, November 26th, 2004

Continuous integration and lava lamps

Who says software engineering principles are boring?
Published in Codin' on Monday, November 22nd, 2004