A Developer’s Most Important Interface

November 1, 2009
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A long time ago, I was actively playing a MUD. A MUD is like World of Warcraft, only on a much smaller scale, and there are no graphics. It’s all text based. To make your character do anything, you have to type commands at the prompt.
The thing with this MUD was that fights [...]

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Do You Speak Binary?

October 20, 2009

How well do you know the fundamental unit of information, communication, computation?
When interviewing coders, I often like to ask them to explain how they would implement a function which counts the number of bits set in an integer. This is often called the “population counting” problem. In Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How [...]

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5 Favorite Excuses to Avoid Fixing Your Architecture

October 12, 2009
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Do you remember your last quarrel over whether the current architecture of your software is a good one? Were you defending or attacking?
I’m sure some parts of that discussion weren’t completely rational. Here’s a list of some of my favorite irrational arguments against fixing a broken architecture. Maybe the list helps you [...]

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Platforms Come With a Culture

October 6, 2009
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Porting software to another platform is tricky business. Take the first version of Safari for Windows as an example. It was not a great success, because Safari 3 on Windows did not quite fit in:
Other grumbles were more because Safari seems like a Mac-application, making it seem out of place on a Windows [...]

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Thinking Forth: the Unsung Classic

October 2, 2009
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A colleague recently pointed me to the book Thinking Forth by Leo Brodie.
While it is heavily a book about Forth (the programming language), it’s even more a book about programming and problem solving in general. I don’t know Forth, and have no intention of learning it, but I found this book to be chock full [...]

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The Birth of the Grumpy Asshole Programmer

September 30, 2009
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This is a story, based on true life, on how you turn from a happy programmer into something sinister.
Stage 1: The happy creative programmer
You’re developing a new exciting product.  You’re the senior programmer in a small and talented team.  You’re responsible for a lot of the core functionalities – you get to write a lot [...]

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Putting Things in Perspective: What is Expensive, What is Cheap?

September 27, 2009

This is a breakdown of yearly expenses for one software developer (in USD), highly irresponsibly gathered from various sources on the internet.  For illustrative purposes only, parts may be missing, your mileage will vary, batteries not included.  But, I think it’s not that far from the truth.
So, what does this picture tell me?  Lots of [...]

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Overriding System Functions for Fun and Profit

September 23, 2009
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Selectively overriding functions in shared libraries is a little known but simple enough trick. You too can replace system functions with your own versions, or hook into them to add extra functionality.
What follows works as-is on most Linux distributions. For other Unix flavors you may need to tweak a thing or four, but [...]

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Approximate Regex Matching in Python

September 19, 2009
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We all love a little regex hacking now and then. I loved it enough to even write a regex matching library called libtre. The cool thing about this library is that it supports searching for approximate matches.
The approximate matching features of this library are being used for things like improving OCR results, generating [...]

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Programming Problems in Disguise

September 12, 2009
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Have you ever written a parser for a configuration file?  Or a data driven interpreter which walks through data, and dispatches appropriate actions?  I’ve written too many to count, and more than half of them were a waste of time. They were a waste of time because they were programming problems in disguise.
A classical disguised [...]

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