December 4th
Every morning, when I come to work and login into the development server, I have a script that shows me all the files that have changed during the previous day.
Since I want to keep myself...
You can't be a corporate programmer and only know how to write code.
If writing code is all you can, you are doomed to oblivion in a dark corner of a forgotten underground office. Your social...
November 24th
To see which CVS repository is being pointed at by the various subdirectories of a local CVS project checkout:
find . -path "*CVS/Root" -exec cat {} \;
And to change the...
November 20th
Have you ever played this game: taking a large piece of paper, and sitting down beside it together with a couple of small children, and all together try to draw, say, a fairytale landscape?
If...
November 19th
A widespread conception is that programs really have two sides: their source code and their runtime.
With most languages, the distinction is made quite clear by the role of the compiler:...
November 15th
This evening I attended to a seminary given by Andy Hunt, the co-author of 'The pragmatic programmer', one of my favorite computing books.
He gave a one hour talk starting with the title 'how...
October 12th
I have too many private books at work. I wouldn't even notice if I was missing one. Time to make an inventory. From left to right, and up to down:
* Joel on software (Joel Spolsky)
* Code...
September 18th
While cleaning up a few old directories, I came upon a text I wrote on what must have been a particularly glad day at work. Taking the risk of sounding almost mystical, here it comes, naked and...
August 31st
As a software developer, one spends most of one's time thinking and writing code.
This process is recognized by many as closely related to the work of artists. It follows similar patterns:...
August 27th
Like probably most developers of my age, I haven't learned LISP at school nor used it for anything more than hacking .emacs file.
But I have heard of LISP. Sometimes in horrified tones...
I found an interesting web site today: www.ohloh.net .
This site monitors a number of open source projects having public repositories. It analyzes the activity in the repositories and...
July 18th
If I say "floating point arithmetic", is your hair rising on your head?
If it is, you probably have experienced the kind of precision issues in arithmetic calculations that I have been...
July 11th
A couple of years ago, I started releasing code that I was developing during working hours as open source. That was the first step on a journey that helped me clear my mind on a number of issues...
June 20th
After 4 months of waiting and a number of delivery incidents, I finally received my copy of 'Types and programming languages' (Benjamin Pierce's famous TAPL).
That completes the series of my...
June 8th
There are some mornings when I can feel a real sense of euphoria upon sitting on my chair in front of my dual screen. I sit and roll the chair closer to my desk, I can feel time slowing down and...
May 25th
How can you list all the subroutines defined in a Perl package, at runtime?
Trying to answer that question, I googled a bit, digged around on cpan, and stumbled upon a few answers. The first...
April 30th
I am currently in Copenhagen, Danmark, just after attending the 5th edition of the Nordic Perl Workshop.
Perl conferences are always very stimulating: it may sound self evident to just say...
April 20th
Over the past few months I have been working quite intensively at implementing calculation algorithms for my employer. It has mainly been about computing rates (internal rates of return, time and...
April 12th
If you have time to spend and are looking for neural stimulation, here are short articles about software , gathered by Joel Spolsky (the man behind Joel on Software ) as part of his compilation...
April 11th
A recurring argument against weakly typed languages is that the risk introduced by their lack of compile time type checking is so tremendous that no mentally sane developer should consider using a...
