Igor Delovski Board

delovski · Joined: 14 Jun 2006 Posts: 3523 Location: Zagreb

Joel Spolsky: My First BillG Review

On June 17, 1991, I started working for Microsoft on the Excel team. My title was "Program Manager."

delovski · Joined: 14 Jun 2006 Posts: 3523 Location: Zagreb

By Joel too: "How Microsoft Lost the API War"

"There are two opposing forces inside Microsoft, which I will refer to,
somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as The Raymond Chen Camp and The MSDN
Magazine Camp."

"Raymond Chen is a developer on the Windows team at Microsoft. He's
been there since 1992, and his weblog The Old New Thing is chock-full of
detailed technical stories about why certain things are the way they are in
Windows, even silly things, which turn out to have very good reasons."

"The other camp is what I'm going to call the MSDN Magazine camp,
which I will name after the developer's magazine full of exciting articles
about all the different ways you can shoot yourself in the foot by using
esoteric combinations of Microsoft products in your own software. The
MSDN Magazine Camp is always trying to convince you to use new and
complicated external technology like COM+, MSMQ, MSDE, Microsoft Office,
Internet Explorer and its components, MSXML, DirectX (the very latest
version, please), Windows Media Player, and Sharepoint..."

And this one too: Fire And Motion

"Microsoft is shooting at you, and it's just cover fire so that they can
move forward and you can't, because this is how the game is played,
Bubby."

delovski · Joined: 14 Jun 2006 Posts: 3523 Location: Zagreb

Archeologist · Guest

Some history of Visual Basic: Irony

"Visual Basic 1.0 started out as an outside company founded by Alan Cooper
(who writes books and consults on UI design), which had some code -- not
yet a product -- named RUBY. It was just a forms designer and didn't have
a back end programming language behind it."

Archeologist · Guest

Out-Of-Memory Conditions

"In the Win 16 days when people actually ran out of memory all the time,
Excel was written so that "Save" could be accomplished without a single
malloc. Whatever memory Save needed to do its job was preallocated at
startup time and never released. No matter how much trouble you got
yourself into you could save your work."

delovski · Joined: 14 Jun 2006 Posts: 3523 Location: Zagreb

Followup on freezing MacBook Pro

"This totally corresponded to what I was seeing... suddenly any app that
tried to do a DNS lookup of any sort would go into permanent beachball
mode and never recover."