rc3.org

When all else fails, blame a programmer. Credit rating agency Moody’s blames a software error for granting inflated ratings to certain securities. However, as Andrew Leonard points out, it just so happens that Moody’s rival Standard & Poors rated the same securities identically. I guess it’s easier to blame the software than it is [...]

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The Relevance blog has an excellent post on simplifying code called Refactoring from Ceremony to Essence. In part it explains why people find Ruby on Rails to be a compelling alternative to J2EE, but it also illustrates a number of techniques applied by Ruby on Rails that could just as easily be used regardless of [...]

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Over a month later, post number two in my “rules of thumb” for developers series. The first post was on writing less code, period. This one is on using less indentation.

What I really mean by this is that I’m strongly not in favor of complex nested code structures. I find them to be difficult to [...]

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Programming guru Donald Knuth on unit tests:

As to your real question, the idea of immediate compilation and “unit tests” appeals to me only rarely, when I’m feeling my way in a totally unknown environment and need feedback about what works and what doesn’t. Otherwise, lots of time is wasted on activities that I [...]

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Evaluating tools is sort of like judging art. The two questions you should have about a work of art are, “Do I like it?” and “Is it important?” They’re completely separate. You may not enjoy the music of The Beatles, but that doesn’t change the fact that they were hugely important in the evolution of [...]

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I was discussing basic coding philosophy today and realized that I have a few rules of thumb that I bring to my programming. I guess you’d call them a basic sensibility of how to write code. The three big rules are:

Write less code. Use less indentation. Write more methods. Externalize everything.

I’ll write separate posts for each of these [...]

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The Quick and the Ed. How class (or income bracket) affects college admissions. Usually it’s better to be a rich idiot than smart and poor. O’Reilly Radar: Review Board is good software. Software for managing code reviews. David Pogue: Can Blogger-Bashers Predict the Success of a Product? Unlikely. I find the gadget blogs to be nearly useless. FP [...]

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Washington Post: Memo: Laws Didn’t Apply to Interrogators. The White House has finally released the John Yoo memo that dismantled the rule of law to Congress. Philadelphia Daily News: NFL Films is taking shots. It’s sad but not surprising that NFL Films is falling out of favor with the NFL. This is one of those decisions [...]

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Recently the IT Project Failures blog reported on a billion dollar project failure at the US Census Bureau. The idea was that the 2010 census would be taken with handheld devices rather than paper forms, and Harris Corp was awarded a $600 million contract to design the devices. The project is now $2 billion over [...]

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My friend Stan Taylor is a QA guru at Borland, and has started a new blog to document his experiences with agile testing. I’m very much looking forward to his insights in this area, as Borland has been walking the walk on agile development for awhile now.

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