Agile, Post-Agile, Scrum, XP, Heavyweight, Waterfall, SDLC, Oh My! All of these (and many more) are software development methodologies with supporters and detractors alike. The definitions of what makes up each one varies as much as the people who profess to use them; sometimes the labels themselves are hardly indicative of how they really work. I won't
Developing With Just-In-Time Information When I started Mac programming in 1985, all I needed was K&R C, a 680000 assembly language manual and the three loose-leaf binders of Inside Macintosh. For those who started in Pascal all you needed was in the binders. Just this year I have worked in Java, PHP,
A Tale Of Two Waterfalls Before I poke waterfalls with a stick, a couple of stories. Story, Waterfall One Project Manager: What are your requirements? Customer: I want to float on the Niagara river. Project Manager: What would you like to float with? Customer: A boat? Project Manager: What type of boat do you require?
Interview Technique: A Topdown Approach Having spent too much of life on both ends of interviewing people (mostly as the interviewee lately) I've seen and experienced a world of different styles. The intent of a first interview is usually to separate the ditch-digger from the real coder. Most of the interview techniques suck.
How Much Privacy Are You Willing To Give Up For A Job? I just turned down being interviewed for a contract position due to the client's demands for an invasive examination of my life which even exceeded what I had to do for a Secret security clearance. Here's what they wanted me to fill out before a phone
Am I Too Old To Be A Programmer? One of my 5 job prospects in progress decided after the first in person interview to pass on me despite acing every phone interview and hearing great feedback about my experience. It could be something else, but some people react negatively to my 25 years of experience. It's
Apple's Numbers Spreadsheet - Like My Trapeze Spreadsheet But 20 Years Later It's interesting looking at the features and marketing behind Apple's new Numbers Spreadsheet (just added in iWork 08). So familiar to me as I and the rest of Data Tailor (Bob Murphy, Ken Clark) in 1987 released Trapeze, a spreadsheet program for the Mac with a
The Mythical Man-Month - 32 Years Old And Still Relevant "The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering" is a book written by Fred Brooks back in 1975, based on his experiences managing IBM's OS/360. It's still a classic book, and despite how long ago it was written, much of it remains relevant. People
Software is Evolutionary and Revolutionary Of all the engineering disciplines, programming is the most malleable. Virtually anything you can imagine can be built in software, assuming enough hardware is available; however, the sad truth is that most programming is so constrained by convention, standards, enterpriseness and a major lack of imagination that it rarely lives
The Stupidity Of Interviews Job interviews in this industry have definitely gone down hill in the past few years. What used to be about determining character fit and general programming ability has been reduced to single method writing, doing logic puzzles and API memorization. Resumes seem to be mostly useless, virtually no one actually
A Programmer Metaphor: The Farmer and the Cowboy In all the years that I have been working as a programmer, I've seen other programmers and the companies that hire them fall into two camps: farmers and cowboys. In real life farmers keep a regular schedule (wake up early, milk the cows, etc), are suspicious of new
Why Customer Needs and IT Requirements Don't Always Intersect One thing I have learned in my career is that what a customer needs in a software solution is often very different from what winds up in a requirements document. The software that is delivered then becomes a source of contention between the customer and IT: "It's
Programmers Are from Mars, Project Managers Are Sometimes from Hell One of the common characters in most software development shops is the "Project Manager", whose job is to oversee the various phases of a project, from requirements gathering to hopefully shipping the result on time and on budget. Sadly few of the projects managers I have worked with
A Thank You From Robert Fulghum I received this kind email from Robert Fulghum on my post "All I Need To Know To Be A Better Programmer I Learned In Kindergarten". He is the author of the original and famous "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten". What an
Coprolitic Programming While I wile away my time writing a major post (The Future Of Programming), I'd like to approach a scary secret of our industry: Coprolitic Programming. Coprolite: Fossilized dung Coprolitic Programming: Working on systems of fossilized crap Everyone has known or has worked on software systems or applications
All I Need To Know To Be A Better Programmer I Learned In Kindergarten Programming is complicated stuff, but a lot of what makes a good programmer isn't all that different from the earliest learning we did in school. The inspiration for this list came from the essay "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten" by Robert
Your Brain On Code: What Makes You Able To Program I have always been under the impression that most of the population doesn't have whatever it is that makes us able to be effective programmers. Even among programmers there is something that distinguishes the really good from the really average. What is it in the brain that is
My Own Successful Startup Story ... In 1984 After reading Paul Grahams latest post Why to Not Not Start a Startup, I thought about my own software startup and figured it might be interesting to write it up. Doing a software startup today is a completely different animal than it was for me, but the desire hasn'
If Being A Programmer Were Like Being An Air Traffic Controller * Every time your software crashed, 300 people would die * You get new tools every 30 years, whether you need them or not * Everyone has to use the same language * A good day is coming home and not seeing your work on the news * A bad day is coming home and
How to Screw up Choosing a Vendor: First Form a Committee... Although many of my disaster stories involved places I've worked, this one takes place in the city I live in, Arlington, Texas. The Story Arlington is best known as the largest city in the US with no public transportation, and home of one of the most dense retail
Good Programmers Do Like to Code; It's All the Other Crap They Don't Like I read Programmers Don't Like to Code a few weeks ago and spent some time thinking about it before wanting to comment. There is much to like in the article yet I'm not sure I can really agree with the title. If you ask any real
The Absolute Need To Understand One sign of a good programmer is their absolute need to understand. Whether the environment they are coding in, the language or frameworks they use, or even the theory behind what they are trying to develop, the need to understand is a driving force in people who make good programmers.
A Programming Language List After seeing this Programming Languages Chart again, I thought about all the programming languages that I have learned and actually written code in: * Dartmouth Basic * Fortran II * APL * Applesoft Basic * 6502 assembly * Z80 assembly * Fortran 66 * IBM JCL * Fortran 77 * Jovial J73 * Mil Std 1750a assembly * Z8000 assembly * Turbo Pascal
Steve Jobs Doesn't Put up Crap and Neither Should You Since returning to Apple ten years ago, almost everything that has come out of Apple has been amazing. Not everything has been successful (the Cube) but everything has grabbed people's attention in ways no other technology company has. The primary reason is that Steve refuses to put out
The Real Revolution in the iPhone Is the Fully Programmable User Interface The Apple iPhone is the world's first (as far as I know) portable device with a fully programmable interactive user interface. That is the real revolution that will affect us all in the near future. Other than a few simply buttons, the entire functional interface of the iPhone
