Over Labor Day I spent some time ranting about how the quality of jeans and many consumer goods has been on a steep decline as U.S. companies have aggressively outsourced production. It would be easy to write the discussion off as an abnormal geek obsession. Ok that’s true. But I do believe that the recognition of quality and craftsmanship is important if you, yourself, want to produce a high quality product.
Joel recently released a talk he gave at last year’s Business of Software…
10 years ago, when home internet access was limited to dial-up modems, many discussions in the industry centered on the last mile problem. Completing the last leg of the high speed internet to residences was going to cost far more and be a much bigger technical problem than the commercial backbone. At the time I didn’t own a computer because the access I had at home was dwarfed by what we had at the office. In college I had a glimpse of the future when 10meg Ethernet was run through…
A few months ago I wrote how I was humbled trying to record screen capture demos of our product for internal training. My original attempt wasn’t too productive. I probably was overly ambitious and set my standards too high. But recently I decided to give it another shot, with the opposite expectations. I lowered my standands and decided to release what ever I created in one take. Well, I was late for dinner, so I had to do it one take.
This was more successful and I was able to…
It has been awhile since I’ve updated my website regularly. In retrospect, I regret this. 15 years after logging onto the internet, I still believe in the democratization of information that it once promised. Before it was almost impossible to distribute content with any scale, and the media was firmly controlled by the few. If you think the media controls opinion now, remember what it was like before the net.
These days to gain any recognition or influence as a content producer…
Some American made goods for Labor day…
Today, while perusing the web site of one of the few companies in the U.S. which sell the Japanese jeans I wear, I saw a product by the Japanese apparel company, Sugar Cane,
jeans made in the U.S., that caused me to pause. I had just documented some
of my
U.S. made goods, and high quality U.S. made jeans
are something I’ve been seeking for years, but they are almost unobtainable in the U.S.
In the last couple years I’ve been entrenched in a project management role which I have enjoyed, but for better or worse, I’ve probably spent more time in meetings, than writing code. But recently, I’ve become more involved in development process again, and I’m enjoying my work more than I have in a long time.
To be honest, the guys on my team, which I’m fortunate enough to say are damn brilliant developers, are a lot more in tuned to the intricacies of our current platform. Linq…
We recently shipped a significant release (way to go guys!) of our application. At the end of a release cycle I typically demo the app to the other depts to bring everybody up to speed on the new features. Since this release is chocked full of brilliant new features, not to mention a completely updated UI, I had what I thought was a genius idea: create a screen capture demo video.
It seemed simple enough: just go through my normal demo, but record it. To my surprise, this has turned into…
The netbook represents a serious threat to Microsoft’s core OS business.
For years, I’ve believed Microsoft was in a precarious position in the market because the cost of software
had become a larger precentage of the cost of a new PC.
In 2004 I said:
When PCs cost $3000+, DOS and Windows ran about $100 for OEMs. That amounts to about 3% of the retail cost. Fast forward 10 years. A PC can be had for less than $500. If Windows cost even $50 (which is low), that is 10% of the…
Outside a few choice racing sims,
I’ve never really gotten into gaming. I’ve always found coding itself to be enough of a game to keep entertained at the keyboard. But Jeff Atwood, he’s a gamer, and it makes him a better developer.
Until recently I didn’t think that gaming could improve my understanding of general application design, but it is becoming clear that Jeff’s appreciation for the psychology of gaming (aka fun computing) is helping to make Stack Overflow a…
Note: This is a work in progress, and I’m interested in soliciting feedback. These are the guidelines I use with my own team, but this is my first attempt at formalizing them.
Often when there is a recommendation to omit goto from a language developers pointing out the edge cases where goto can make sense will argue for the inclusion of the construct, and surprisingly even relatively new languages often contain a goto statement.
There are extremely few cases where a goto is optimal,…
