I remember when I was first learning the art and science of software engineering, a really big part of almost all of the techniques was around “reusability”. I suppose even then schedule overruns were fairly common (and given that Brooks’s The Mythical Man-Month was published in 1975, I suspect I’m right), and it was assumed […]
Have you ever noticed that pretty much anyone, when looking at something for the first time, or joining a project or new effort, seems to always think it is a big mess? And probably needs fixing, perhaps even a complete throwaway and rewrite? I have a running joke that I frequently use, along these lines. […]
I am occasionally asked for career advice by people wanting to get into the industry, for example, high-schoolers deciding on career choices. One situation that frequently comes up in this situation is people who love programming and want to get a job being a programmer. They ask, “How can I get a job as a […]
So this will be an interesting blog post. I’m going to combine engineering with…working out! There’s a little saying that goes around about working out. The saying goes, What’s the best exercise to do? The answer is, the one that you will stick with and actually do! The idea is supposed to be to find […]
or, The Art of Writing Requirements. When you are writing software for an end user, if you strip away all the fluff and bells and whistles, you are doing something very simple: You are solving a problem for someone. The heart of this issue is a simple concept: when you are writing software, what are […]
I distinctly remember a few years ago reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I recall that at about halfway through there’s a discussion on Quality. Specifically, the speaker asserts that Quality itself is not truly definable, and Quality is the breakpoint between rationality and…whatever the opposite of rationality is. One interesting thought experiment […]
Knuggets of Knowledge 