Posts tagged with Engineering
Naming Things Good
A colleague reminded me of this corny computer science joke a couple months back: There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors. Though there are some who dispute the difficulty of naming things,…
Down the Memory Lane of Programming Languages
I saw this prompt through my Twitter feed, and decided to join in on the fun: 1994: QBASIC (elem school) 1998: Pascal (high school) 1999: Delphi 2000: Scheme (college) 2004: C++ (first job) 2008: PHP (web dev) 2009: Python + JavaScript…
Enterprise Grade Code
On a recent episode of the ATP podcast, one of the hosts lamented the idea that the PHP code that they've been writing has inexorably evolved and modernized —corrupted, even. Whereas PHP in its heyday was merely a…
The Software Engineer Gold Rush
My computer science undergrad lasted through both the boom and bust cycles of the dotcom era. I entered as a freshmen in 2000, on the tail end of a multi-year technology bull market that saw unqualified companies force their way…
Code is a Cultural Artifact
So I've been accused, more than once, of obsessing over organizational structures. Heck, I just waxed poetically about Conway's Law recently, and that was just after leading a couple of sessions at a conference on, specifically,…
Repo Configuration and a Difference of Concerns
In the beginning of the year, there was a strongly-worded technical article about monorepos[1], and why they're worse, in absolute terms, in comparison to using multiple repositories for code (i.e., "polyrepo"). The article certainly…
