Development

The Decline and Fall of Agile

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A good writeup by James Shore on The Decline and Fall of Agile (James Shore blog). Software development projects are a hard thing; not necessarily because of the software, but because people are involved. I’ve worked on the most mature (and rigid) software development process in the world, the Space Shuttle on-board software (SEI 5), … Read more

Java is the top programming language

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According to the Tiobe Programming Community Index, Java is the top/dominant programming language (Aug 2008): Tiobe Programming Community Index, August 2008 (Credit: Tiobe) The same reports indicates that COBOL scores a new all time low (at position 19), yet it still is above Objective-C (at position 42)! Top 10 programming languages: 1.    Java 2. … Read more

Twitter as a Case Study

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So Twitter is down, again. Twitter, a great idea, but terribly designed and implemented… Twitter is a great case study: for what a badly designed piece of software is all about, for what not do, or what to avoid, or how NOT to architect and deploy software (i.e. by avoiding everything they have done so … Read more

Refactoring automation is like a spreadsheet

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“Refactoring is the process of changing a software system in such a way that it does not alter the external behavior of the code yet improves its internal structure.” — MartinFowler in RefactoringImprovingTheDesignOfExistingCode. Refactoring automation is to S/W developers what spreadsheets are to financial planners… In the past, when doing financial planning, you will do … Read more

Better development tools for growing projects

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As our project needs grow, it was clear that it was time for eZee to invest some dough into better, integrated tools for issue tracking, change management, and knowledge sharing. For this we acquired Atlassian’s Jira, FishEye (w/ Subversion which we already were using), and Confluence (Enterprise Wiki), respectively. While not free tools, it’s worth … Read more

Bray on “Why is Ruby on Rails so darn slow?”

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Tim Bray said at his Ruby Conference keynote speech last week: Rails is “a big deal, a hot deal”, : : “Let’s face the facts: Ruby is too slow,” Bray told delegates. He says Ruby 1.8.6 – which dominates the enterprise landscape – is up to 20 times slower than Java. : : “When you … Read more

Using Static Analysis For Software Defect Detection

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A very good presentation Using Static Analysis For Software Defect Detection; William Pugh, Google TechTalks, July 6, 2006: William Pugh — I’ll talk about some of my experience in using and expanding static analysis tools for defect detection. The FindBugs tool developed at the Univ. of Maryland is now being widely used, including inside Google. … Read more

Ten reasons why every programmer should learn C

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The C Language is probably the most important programming language; it is fast, compact, and pervasive, and it exposes programmers to very important skills and concepts; you can't be sloppy when using C. The C Language is the language of choice for building operating systems, other programming languages, and embedded and real-time applications. Anything truly … Read more