Scripting – Higher Level Languages For The 21st Century
There’s been a lot of debate on the Extreme Programming list recently about Tcl vs Java, mostly spurred by Dossy’s citation of the Jeff Hobbs quote: I’ve come to the realization that there are so many...
View ArticleWhy Software Developers Refuse to Improve
Karen asks why we, as software creators, haven’t yet learnt about the things that people were writing about more than 20 years ago. This ties neatly into an article I was reading yesterday in the April...
View ArticlePerfect Productivity
If we hope to be able to measure productivity in some quantifiable way, we must first appreciate what it means to be “more productive.” If I say that programmer A is “five times” more productive than...
View ArticleThe Power of Tiny Tasks
IT Week this week references the Web Effectiveness Report 2003, which, amongst other things, reveals that only 19% of web site managers surveyed review their log files to look for problems with their...
View ArticleFacts of Programmer Productivity
Joel’s Book of the Month this month is Robert Glass’s Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering. This has been on my To Buy list for a while, as I keep stumbling across articles by Robert Glass that...
View ArticleMail Handling
One of the other things that’s changed quite dramatically in the past three months is the way in which I deal with my mail. I’ve been through a number of different mail clients and setups in the past,...
View ArticleSix Ways on Getting Less Done each day
Playing with del.icio.us yesterday, I came across the popular post “Six Ways on Getting More Done each day”. I certainly hope its popularity isn’t a sign that people are going to follow its ideals. 1....
View ArticleHow Much Code Inspection is Enough?
When we first introduced mandatory code review at BlackStar, where another member of the development team had to review the code before it went live, we ran into the perennial problem of how long such...
View ArticlePerl Aikido
I’ve spent the last two days in Damian Conway’s “Advanced Module Implementation” course. In it he steps through, line by line, the core code of his Attribute::Handlers, NEXT, Class::Delegation,...
View ArticleHow fast can you type?
Whenever I teach a Dreamweaver or JavaScript class, few of the students can type. I usually spend a minute or two trying to convince them that being able to type will not only save them time and...
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