Programmer Cartoon: Your Company App Wednesday, February 17, 2010

I was watching Joel Spolsky Tech Talk at Google about StackOverflow, and he brought up a URL on "programmer cartoon".  The link is: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/84556/whats-your-favorite-programmer-cartoon.

This may be my new favorite...

Here is the original link to the comic post:

http://stuffthathappens.com/blog/2008/03/05/simplicity/

Coders at Work and Duct Tape Programming Wednesday, January 27, 2010

I finally finished reading Coders at Work!  I really enjoyed the interviews with Jamie Zawinksi, Douglas Crockford, Brendan Eich, and Ken Thompson.  I wasn't too interested in compilers and the much older systems some of the programmers once developed in.  I must admit, I had a short attention span reading over those sections.

Anyway, the reason I picked this book up was because back in late September to early October 2009, I remember reading several blog posts on duct tape programming.  They all pointed to Joel Spolsky's blog post: The Duct Tape Programmer.

The quote was from Jamie Zawinkski, on his pet peeve of developers who over-engineer:

At the end of the day, ship the fucking thing!  It's great to rewrite code and make it cleaner and by the third time it'll actually be pretty.  But that's not the point-- you're not here to write code; you're here to ship products.  --Jamie Zawinkski

My first reaction after reading Spolsky's post was with some disgust.  The word that came to mind was: Grief.  Software developer grief.  Let me explain.

I define software developer grief as the unhappiness a developer gets from inheriting badly written or non-functional code from another developer.  I have felt this grief a few times.  I've had to work with code where it's been released out to production, where the code doesn't even function properly and hasn't, EVER.

Now I'm not aware of what the development conditions were like when those kind of coding projects were in place.  But, the code, definitely shouldn't have shipped.  In these cases, duct-tape or band-aids were used instead of a functioning wheel to the go-cart; because the go-cart just wasn't doing what it should have been doing.

But after reading Uncle Bob's response, it made more sense what Spolsky was talking about.  The spirit of what they're both preaching, is to ship working code, it doesn't have to be pretty or perfect, just make it work!  The clean-up can, and should occur later.

That, I agree with.

Get the book on Amazon:

Android SDK issue on Windows 7 x64 Tuesday, January 26, 2010

I recently installed the Android SDK and Eclipse (32-bit) onto my Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit machine.  First thing I wanted to do was go through the Android Hello World Tutorial.

Well, I ran into the following error message:

'java' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program, or batch file.  SWT folder '' does not exist.  Please set ANDROID_SWT to point to the folder containing swt.jar for your platform.

I read somewhere that I should install the x64 Java version.  However, when I went to Java download page, it didn't even have the x64 version available to download.  Turns out that the problem was that I was using Google Chrome to browse there.  I had to use Internet Explorer (x64 bit version) to get the x64 Java link to even show up!

This worked for me, but you can check out the following link at StackOverflow:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1919340/android-sdk-setup-under-windows-7-pro-64-bit

My Favorite Tech and Programming News Feeds Friday, January 8, 2010

I previously posted on my favorite tech podcasts, so I wanted to post a little snippet of my favorite tech RSS feeds from Google Reader.  I read a lot more than I list here, but these are my absolute favorites.

My favorite Tech RSS Feeds:

• Lifehacker RSS
  
• Gizmodo RSS
  
• Mashable! RSS
• Silicon Alley Insider RSS
  

My favorite Programming RSS Feeds:

• Reddit Programming RSS
  
• Hacker News RSS
  
• Coding Horror RSS
  
• Devlicio.us RSS
  
• CodeBetter.Com RSS
• The Daily WTF RSS
  

Hooked on Tech Podcasts Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Lately I’ve been immersed in code at work as well as at home for a side project.  But I don’t like to code in silence all the time, so I got myself re-hooked on to listening to podcasts, while I develop.

Here are the direct links to the current individual podcasts I subscribe to:

• .Net Rocks
• 37signals Podcast
• Alt.NET Podcast
• dnrTV
• Hanselminutes
• Pragmatic Podcasts
• Software Engineering Radio - The Podcast for Professional Software Developers
• The Thirsty Developer – Podcast
• Windows Weekly

Or if you really trust my taste, here’s a single RSS feed to all the podcasts I subscribe to:

• Steven's Podcast RSS feed on Google Reader

The latter link will get updated with new feeds I find interesting.  Enjoy!

What I love about Microsoft Tuesday, September 8, 2009

I am primarily a Microsoft software developer.  But I was not always a M$FT user/developer so to speak.  I used to use Windows 3.1 back in the heyday, followed a little with Windows 95/98.  But by then, I was a college student at Boston University.  The computer labs there had primarily Unix terminals and Solaris boxes.  So I naturally had to use and learn these technologies.  Everything from using the command shell, pine, star office, gcc compiler, etc.  It wasn’t easy to pick up, but a great learning experience nonetheless.  I later used Linux (Red Hat/Mandrake) on my home PCs.

Now, to the point of my blog.

I love how Microsoft treats college students so well.  Over my undergraduate years (1997-2001), more and more terminals were turning into Windows NT/2000 workstations, donated of course by Microsoft.  There were group meetings that they setup on campus to promote their products and give away free software and development tools such Visual Studio 6.0 and Windows 2000 Professional beta.

Present day: Hundreds and thousands of dollars worth of software are still being distributed.  Check out the following sites that offer students (high school through graduate level students at colleges/universities) free Microsoft software:

• MSDN Academic Alliance
• Microsoft DreamSpark

Now, from a business standpoint, this is smart.  Microsoft gives these software freely to poor college students and gets them hooked.  When these students graduate and move into the working world, they’ll naturally want to continue using all the Microsoft software.

From a developer’s point-of-view, Microsoft gives so much to academics.  I was a PHP/MySQL developer before I started developing projects with ASP.net.  Why did I switch over?—Because I got their IDE, Visual Studio .Net for free!  All I had to do was attend a Microsoft launch event.  If I had to personally pay for the software, I probably would never have gotten started using Microsoft technologies.  I would have been happy freely using LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQl, PHP).

Now, this probably does sound as though Microsoft is a crack dealer or something.  They get you hooked and you never get out!  Funny, but somewhat true.

Eric Schmidt's Keynote Speech at Carnegie Mellon Tuesday, May 19, 2009

I always enjoy speeches made by Eric Schmidt. I wish he spoke at my undergrad and/or grad commencement!



My favorite quote:

“How should you behave? Well, do things in a group. Don’t do things by yourself. Groups are stronger, groups are faster. None of us is as smart as all of us.”-- Eric Schmidt