Author: James R. Twine
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Amazing thing with Test Driven Design (TDD)
At my current place of employment, we had someone come in to talk about some Agile development processes. One of them was Test Driven Development. As an example, the presenter explained how scoring works in bowling and then asked the audience to create the code used to implement the scoring. To make a long story…
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What is “good software”?
As I am reading a thread on WorseThanFailure (Our Dirty Little Secret), I see a post by “VGR” that states that companies do not recognize “good software”, but rather “finished” or “not finished.” This is an interesting point. But a question I would like answered is this – what exactly is good software? How does…
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Why Performance is Important
When discussing topics like optimization and performance, there are far too many developers that either believe that performance is not important(!) or that the things taken to optimize the performance of something somehow magically results in making that system less robust. For the first point, I can not image any developer that has ever uttered…
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Premature Optimization may not be premature…
There is an interesting thing I am noticing with younger developers – anytime someone mentions optimization, the first words out of their mouths is something about how how the optimization is premature optimization, and is only going to cause more harm than good. These developers lack a certain wisdom that comes with years of varied…
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I want to meet the developer(s) of Sybase SQL Advantage…
Version: 12.5.0.3/EBF 10752 IR/P/NT (IX86)/OS 4.0/Wed Jan 15 12:59:30 2003 Why? Because I want to ask them why it takes SQL Advantage ~16 seconds to process a query that returns 674 rows of ~70 columns each and display them in Grid or Text output, when I have written an application that goes through two additional…
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Just not getting it…
I came across a poster some time ago (I think on /.) that had an interesting signature. It read something along the lines of: When someone says: Lead, follow or get out of the way, get in the way! I remember thinking at the time that the poster could likely use some more experience in…
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Best WTF Moments – Correcting the Test’s Answers
In talking with a friend I was reminded of one of my favorite WTF moments – correcting the answers on an interviewer’s tech questions. Once, while taking an interview for a position, the interviewer was going over my answers for the tech questions and happened to mention that one (or two?) of them were incorrect.…