Programming almost isn't about performance anymore. Performance has to be good enough, but most problems are small enough that's pretty easy. Most of the programming problems at my current and previous job are about managing complexity. We have to write a big complex piece of code that manages lots of attributes and has lots of rules and does lots ( Read more... )

When rearchitecting the world, do it along with the rest of the team.

I recently had the misfortune of doing a 4 month long project to make major changes to the underlying architecture of a project 6 other developers were also actively working on. I did this on a development branch, outside the scope of development the rest of the team was doing. ( Read more... )

I wish the go language had subclassing or macros or templates or something. These are all ways of reusing code without copy and paste. A macro or a template can be applied by the compiler to apply the same code pattern to different data. Subclassing can make things applied to the old data also apply to a new expanded version of that data ( Read more... )

Google AppEngine announced a new pricing model and the killer is that as soon as an 'app'* costs anything it costs $9 per month. The implication to me is clearly this: never do anything small. This probably won't be a barrier to people building a business on AppEngine, they're probably planning on moving many more dollars per month than $9. But I ( Read more... )

Once upon a time, 2001-2007, I worked in the 'embedded' world, working on software for computerized things that go into cars and printers and planes and whatnot. I got into this through hobby hacking a long time ago on a little 8 bit microcontroller, the Motorola 68HC11. I've been craving that hobby hacking again lately. A few years ago I bought a ( Read more... )

I may be going crazy, or it may be that 'avoiding obviously horribly wasteful designs' has become 'premature optimization' while I wasn't looking.

is not to store it at all ( Read more... )

Oracle is having a chilling effect on Java. I don't think I could in good conscience start a project in Java right now given that Oracle might capriciously lock out parts of the Java world. I've been saying for a couple years than Java is my favorite language these days. Nice to use and fast run time. Boo. Maybe I'll go look at the Go language some

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