Dreams of a software developer

A software developer wants to work on something interesting, exciting, and important. He likes to work on cutting-edge stuff. He would like to create a world with only a 4 lines of code or build a universe with a single keystroke. The ultimate dream of a software developer (beside world domination) [...]

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Ctrl-Alt-Del in Linux

Have you ever wondered what the Linux equivalent of CTRL-ALT-DEL in Windows is? Many Linux fans say in Linux an application cannot bring down the whole system. Well, it can. It happens rarely, but it does happen. Here is what you can do for example in Ubuntu, which uses Gnome:

With Ctrl-Alt-BackSpace you can kill the [...]

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Continuous Integration and Agile Development

Did you notice that Continuous Integration and Agile Development are similar? The principle of continuous integration means that members of a team integrate their work frequently, because merging is much easier to do frequently and small rather than rarely and large. Agile development means iterative development with many feedback rounds between customer and developer. The [...]

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Lines of Code

Shakespeare’s sonnets have exactly 14 lines, his plays have usually around 2600 lines (Hamlet about 4000 lines). This is not that different from the few thousand lines of code a typical programmer writes for a unit, library or project, for example jQuery 1.2 and 1.3 have around 4000 LoC (jQuery 1.2.6: 3549 LoC, jQuery 1.3.2: [...]

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Longing for World Domination

As a computer programmer or software developer, you long each day for world domination. To be precise, you stagger constantly between world domination (in German “Weltherrschaft”) and total powerlessness, between absolute might and complete plight, between omnipotence and complete impotence. One day you feel like a mighty emperor, and the next day you feel like [...]

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Clean Software

In TV, there is a series named restaurant tester. Each week, the tester tests selected restaurants, complains about the bad food and finally tries with his magnificient gastronomic knowledge to improve the service of the poor restaurant. As a first step, he often recommends more hygiene, neatness and cleanliness. This often upsets the cooks, because [...]

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The Lake Wobegon effect among Developers

The Lake Wobegon effect in Psychology involves a systematic bias to see yourself as better than average, see also here.
What does this mean for developers? Well, every developer thinks of course that he is terrific. Developers view themselves as much better than average: you cannot get rid of the impression that we think of ourselves [...]

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Absolute power

In the universe which he has created, the computer programmer is the king. He can do what he wants, and like the lion above he has absolute power (a photo from Flickr user RodBegbie). Weizenbaum said in his book Computer Power and Human Reason:
The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone [...]

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20th and 21st Century Software Engineering

Barry Boehm tried in 2006 to summarize the past of software engineering in his paper A View of 20th and 21st Century Software Engineering. It began in 1950 with the thesis that software engineering is like hardware engineering. Then in 1960 the ease of modification for software led many people and organizations to adopt a [...]

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Jason Fried about the Software Business

Jason Fried from 37Signals about planning, roadmaps and specifications

(P.S. if you want to embed Blip.tv videos in WordPress, select “Embed” with “WordPress.com” on the Blip.tv video page – instead of “Share” with “e-Mail” in the right sidebar – and press the green “Go” Button)

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Discipline in Thought

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The Promise, The Limits, The Beauty of Software

Software development has been, is, and I believe will remain fundamentally very hard. We have been able to build things we could not have conceived of some years ago because we have improved in our practices and our processes and our tools and in our languages. But every time we’ve overcome those barriers we realize [...]

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Software Archeology

The moment you write a line of code, it becomes legacy. If the cumulative mass of that legacy is small, then there is correspondingly little inertia; if the cumulative mass is large, then there is considerable resistance to change. Refactoring becomes more and more critical as mass increases, because it drives a software-intensive system to [...]

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Working software is all that matters

Testing frameworks, development processes and operating systems are often very controversial among developers. Some developers hate Windows and only like to work on Linux. Some despise both and only work on Macs. Some hate RSpec and only like Test::Unit, some prefer test/spec. Some prefer HAML, others like RHTML.
Does it matter if you use SCRUM, XP [...]

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The Importance of Tests

How can you ensure and insure that computer programs actually do what they are intended to do? You can’t if you do not test them (on every level, in every context and in every possible situation). Software writing is difficult and will remain to be difficult. There was so much academic talk about verification of [...]

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