Igor Delovski Board

[Ike]

Moving from software production to software publishing

"Iterative delivery is bringing software production very close to monthly
magazine publishing. Although being on time and without problems cannot
be attributed to most software releases, good magazines maintain quality
and produce great issues month after month."

[Ike]

Digg: 1043 programming exercises

"Need to sharpen your skills, or perhaps that shiny new python/ruby/c++/java
book didn't come with any programming exercises? You can't learn a new
language by simply reading about it. Here you will find over 1,000 exercises
ranging from easy to hard. Have fun!"

[delovski]

Joel Spolsky: Lego Programming

"What happens is that some kind of vendor of programming technologies
has come up with some product they are claiming makes programming
easier. The journalists don't really understand. What they hear is “programming
is going to be easier.” Usually there's some kind of Lego allusion."

[delovski]

Washington Post: At Microsoft, a Sad Software Lesson

"The software business remains full of optimists who, bless them, think they
know how to fix their field's problems and overcome this dismal record.
Their confidence springs from the computer industry's experience of the
exponential growth in the capacity of its semiconductor-based hardware."

By Scott Rosenberg, co-founder of Salon.com and the author of "Dreaming
in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest
for Transcendent Software."

[delovski]

Statistics over IT projects failure rate.

"The statistics presented here all converge to establish that:

* an IT project is more likely to be unsuccessful than successful
* about 1 out of 5 IT projects is likely to bring full satisfaction
* the larger the project the more likely the failure"

[Ike]

Expat Software: exampleCode != productionCode

"Maybe nobody had ever told them that the little examples in the book are
just that: Little Examples. For teaching purposes. Never intended for use in
the real world."

[delovski]

Tux Deluxe: Working for The Man

"One of the first things I do when evaluating someone is to look for samples
of their code out there on the Internet. If you work on proprietary software
you can't show anyone anything, and real code speaks louder than any list
of projects you claim to have worked on."

[Ike]

The Most Important Design Guideline?, by Scott Meyers

"Over time, I've come to the conclusion that the most important general
interface design guideline is this: Make interfaces easy to use correctly and
hard to use incorrectly."

[Ike]

RC: How my lack of understanding of how processes exit on
Windows XP forced a security patch to be recalled

"To protect against buggy shell extensions, Explorer was modified to use
a helper program called verclsid.exe whose job was to be the 'guinea pig'
and host the shell extension and do some preliminary sniffing around to
make sure the shell extension passed some basic functionality tests before
letting it run loose in Explorer. That way, if the shell extension went crazy,
the victim would be the verclsid.exe process and not the main Explorer
process."

[Ike]

Mr Angry: Whose bright idea was scheduling?

"If you’re on the business side and have to authorise the expenditure (in this
case, millions of dollars which was an unprecedented IT expenditure for this
company) you want to know what you will be getting and how long it will
take to get.

If you’re the sucker who has to deliver the project, setting a schedule seems
crazy because there are far too many variables."

[delovski]

IBM developerWorks: Six ways to write more comprehensible code,
by Jeff Vogel

"As a developer, time is your most valuable resource:

Tip 1: Comment like a smart person
Tip 2: Use #define a lot. No, a LOT
Tip 3: Don't use variable names that will mock you
Tip 4: Do error checking. You make errors. Yes, you
Tip 5: Premature optimization is the root of all evil
Tip 6: Don't be too clever by half"

[Ike]

People and methodologies in software development,
by Alistair Cockburn

"This thesis reports on research performed over a ten-year period,
interviewing project teams, participating directly on projects, and
reviewing proposals and case studies. The research addressed three
questions relating to people and software development methodologies
(Q1 through Q3), and produced six results (R1 through R6)."

[delovski]

Slashdot: Identifying (and Fixing) Failing IT Projects

"Often, the difference between the success and failure of any IT project
is spotting critical early warning signs that the project is in trouble. CIO.com
offers a few ways to identify the symptoms, as well as suggestions about
what you can do to fix a project gone wrong. ' The original study (which
is still sometimes quoted as if it were current) was shocking.

In 1994, the researchers found that 31 percent of the IT projects were flat
failures. That is, they were abandoned before completion and produced
nothing useful. Only about 16 percent of all projects were completely
successful: delivering applications on time, within budget and with all the
originally specified features.

"As of 2006, the absolute failure rate is down to 19 percent," Johnson
says. "The success rate is up to 35 percent." The remaining 46 percent
are what the Standish Group calls "challenged": projects that didn't meet
the criteria for total success but delivered a useful product.'"

[Ike]

Gojko Adzic: When windows are not enough

"It’s not uncommon for “star” programmers to be an order of magnitude
more productive than their colleagues. I believe that a large part of that
productivity gap comes not from doing tasks faster, but from not doing
them at all."

[Ike]

Hacknot - If They Come, How Will They Build It?

"I have experienced the establishment of a development environment take
anywhere from one day to one month. In the latter case, I spent fully four
weeks chasing individuals, each of whom could tell me only part of the pro-
cedure, before referring me on to someone else. It is indescribably frustrating
to join a project, eager to get up to speed and begin making a contribution,
only to find days or weeks of potentially productive time being lost to such a
basic task."

[Ike]

Hacknot: What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?

"Greco-Roman Software Development - By now you will probably have
recognized the analogue between the cultural divide separating the Greeks
and Romans and the methodological divide between adaptive and plan-driven
approaches to software development."

[XNote]

Inc - How Hard Could It Be?: Five Easy Ways to Fail

"Delays, blown budgets, and outright failures are so common in the software
world, in fact, that it's hardly newsworthy when a project is years late and
millions over budget."

[Ike]

Slashdot: The Curse of Knowledge Bogs Down Innovation

"Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die." The "curse of knowledge," is the
paradox that as our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and
ability to innovate tend to taper off because the walls of the box we think
inside of thicken along with our experience. An article in the NY Times
proposes a solution to the curse: bring outsiders with no experience onto
teams to keep creativity and innovation on track. When experts have to
slow down and go back to basics to bring an outsider up to speed, "it forces
them to look at their world differently and, as a result, they come up with
new solutions to old problems."

[Ike]

Paul Johnson: An Under-Appreciated Fact: We Don't Know How We Program

"The problem lies not with my colleague's intelligence but in a simple fact. It
is so basic that nobody in the software industry notices it, but nobody outside
the industry knows it. The fact is this: there is no process for programming."

[XNote]

slashdot - Guide For Small Team Programming?

"I run a small design shop and have been doing more and more web
development, including fairly involved back-end programming of what's
now essentially become our own CMS. Up to now I've been doing all the
programming myself. Now we are working with a second programmer for
the first time.

I already use version control (SVN) and an issue-tracking system, and I
guess we are both decent at what we do — although self-taught, but we
both lack experience programming in a team context. Is there a useful
guide for this? Most of the tutorials I have seen for Subversion are sur-
prisingly organized from a single coder's perspective. Where else should
I look?"

[delovski]

Creative Code: 14 Ways to Learn From Creative Programmers

"Working with code is one of the most creative jobs one can have. Programmers
have to balance two very different worlds: a world of structure and a world of
imagination... It’s not an easy task."

[delovski]

gamedev.net - Postmortems

"Tales from the trenches. Postmortems are summaries by game developers
of what went well and what didn't during the development of a specific game."

[delovski]

reddit - Just a bunch of helpful links, books, and pages. For those
days when you ask, "How Can I Become A Programmer"

"I scribbled this down in about half an hour for a co-worker."

[delovski]

Wiki - Worse is better

"Worse is better, also called the New Jersey style, was conceived by Richard
P. Gabriel to describe the dynamics of software acceptance, but it has broad-
er application. The idea is that quality does not necessarily increase with fu-
nctionality. There is a point where less functionality ("worse") is a preferable
option ("better") in terms of practicality and usability."

[Ike]

Charlie Kindel - Don’t Build APIs…

"My first job at Microsoft was providing developer support for the early
Windows SDKs. To do my job well, I spent hours studying the Windows
SDK documentation, the Windows source code, and writing sample app-
lications."

[delovski]

ahmetalpbalkan.com - Working at Microsoft

"Two years ago today, I started internship at Microsoft Windows Azure, in
the very same team I joined right after college and I am working for last 8
months."

[delovski]

jamf - Debate over: IBM confirms that Macs are $535 less expensive than PCs

"In 2015, IBM let their employees decide - Windows or Mac. The goal was to
deliver a great employee choice program and strive to achieve the best Mac
program, Previn said. An emerging favorite meant the deployment of 30,000
Macs over the course of the year. But that number has grown. With more
employees choosing Mac than ever before, the company now has 90,000
deployed (with only five admins supporting them), making it the largest Mac
deployment on earth."