Today’s link is for software developers. Don’t be lame. Check your source code in as soon as possible. Don’t be that guy who keeps his code out of sync forcing a big merge mess. I try not to be that guy. I make it a game. Can I get my source checked in (and working) before the other guy?
Working at IniTech sucks. I need to go indie!
Or I just keep on dreaming about it. The antithesis of yoga. Not even the doing. Nor the trying.
Will Shipley wrote a little library/media collection application called Delicious Library which was recently rewritten for Leopard. In this 2.0 version, he finds an awesome bug. It’s an epic tale of debugging wherein you get down into the mind of a developer. The best part is the fact that he thought it through while playing a video game. That’s always the case. For inspiration will strike in the oddest of moments.
Read the tale. Buy the software. Delicious Library 2.0 is a fine application to have on your new Mac.
http://wilshipley.com/blog/2008/07/pimp-my-code-part-15-greatest-bug-of.html
Back before I was a Master at Computer Science, I had to take a class for Computer and Human Interactions. This tried to impart in all the students the need to design for the user. There were GUI tips. Web design tips. Keyboard layout tips. Mousing tips. Joystick and computer input device tips. All was spelled out to help us students understand that the computer was a tool for humans.
One of the important people in the field of human compatibility was Bruce Tognazzini who wrote a lot about it. Here’s his take on iPhone from last year. I can’t believe it has been one whole year since iPhone introduction. In another few days…. 3G!
Are you getting the latest Mac OS?
Snow Leopard is not as fearsome sounding as ocelot would’ve been, but that’s what Apple’s giving us. No new features, but supposedly changes under the hood.
First and foremost, I hope they do some optimization. Make OS X run faster on my MBP. Make it consume less battery.
Next should be some bug fixes. Fix whatever is scary. Then fix the security of the OS. Just make it better.
From a programming perspective, the multi-core programming doo-hicky has to be explained more. I want to know how to make an octocore mac scream. That would be nice.
This year’s Apple Developer conference is sold out. Looks to be a halo effect with iPhone development bringing in others into the Apple/Mac developer fold.
Why am I not one of them? And why are these lame people joining now? I’ve been predicting for years that Mac development is the way to go. Now it looks to have come true. Dang!
As a software developer, it’s humbling to admit mistakes in you’re design. “My kungfu is not as good as I think it is.” You have to be brave, but in the long it’s much better to admit to your shortcomings because you’ll save more. “Scrap it now rather than bandaid it for the future.”
Here’s the Twitter folks admitting to issues with their social network. The questions are phrased in a condescending tone conveying the incredulousness of their situation. “You’re site runs on only one db server?! You update by hand?! What kind of idiots are you?” It’s admirable that the Twitter folks even answered such grueling questions.
Will I be able to fess up the same way if I’m on a software project to nowheresville?
http://blog.twitter.com/2008/05/its-not-rocket-science-but-its-our-work.html
Someone fixes a 25 year old bug in the BSD Unix.
“Who cares? I don’t use Unix anyway,” you might say. Sorry, it’s what’s running beneath the pretty Aqua interface of Mac OS X.
It’s a rather trivial bug, very low level and such. Yet, I wonder why it took this long to find a fix. The open source model of software development touts the fact that with the source available to anyone and everyone all bugs are shallow. That is it should take a short time to find a fix. Yet, the bug fix was just submitted recently!
The funny thing is that it was a known bug. Was it reported to code maintainers? There were programs that knew of the BSD problem and created workarounds for it. Somethings wrong with this the BSD development to let this go untouched for so long.
“Software is a place where dreams are planted and nightmares harvested, an abstract, mystical swamp where terrible demons compete with magical panaceas, a world of werewolves and silver bullets.”
Brad J. Cox
So, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve started a new daily (!!) feature to the site, Quote/Link of the Day. It’s tough to keep that up, especially the quotes. So here’s a site for all software engineers to reference. They got some choice nuggets in there.
Read it and you’ll come to understand the profound difficulty that software development is.
