Elsewhere

Software Team Trade-Offs

17 Apr 10 — Elsewhere — No comments

A quote from Rands about the interaction in software development teams:

Time. Quality. Features. It’s usually described as a triangle, which somehow represents the state of your product or your feature. I believe the idea is that in a perfect and unattainable world, this triangle is perfect, equilateral, and seemingly at rest. There is balance among the time you have to release, the quality you are seeking to attain, and the features you want to ship.

In reality, this triangle is never at rest. It’s constantly shifting and, well, I don’t think it’s actually a triangle. It’s just a mental model that gives you just enough ammunition to lie.

The whole article is worth reading — I like the concept of “Bits”, “Features” and “Truth” as roles for certain people on the team. It seems more approachable than the traditional engineering manager, product manager and program manager titles.

“I’m the Bits” does sound wrong, though.

The Case Against File Comments

4 Apr 10 — Elsewhere — No comments

Ville Laurikari, in an older post that recently made the Hacker News front page, talks about the evils of source-code templates:

Most projects have some kind of standard source code template which has the copyright and license text and placeholders for things like a description. All I have to say is: You don’t need a template. Stop using it.

He’s referring to things like this, found at the top of most source-code files:

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/*
 * File: filename.c
 * Author: Peter J. Vidler
 * Copyright (c) 2010.  All rights reserved.
 */

Actually, that one’s fairly trivial — see the actual post for a much worse example. His post actually seems to be about file-level comments, rather than comment templates, but it’s still worth a read.

The C++ Confidence Curve

29 Mar 10 — Elsewhere — No comments

Louis Brandy on why you should never trust a programmer who says he knows C++:

Programmers (especially those coming from C) can very quickly get up to speed in C++ and feel quite proficient. These programmers will tell you that they know C++. They are lying. As a programmer continues in C++, he goes through this valley of frustration where he fully comes to terms with the full complexity of the language.

Very true, and worth a look just for the diagram.

Issues with the Ogg Container Format

29 Mar 10 — Elsewhere — No comments

With all the recent talk about Ogg Theora, H.264 and patent issues, it’s nice to read an article about the Ogg container format itself that is focussed entirely on technical details:

The Ogg container format is being promoted by the Xiph Foundation for use with its Vorbis and Theora codecs. Unfortunately, a number of technical shortcomings in the format render it ill-suited to most, if not all, use cases.

I have no idea how accurate the article is, but it was certainly refreshing.

Force Field Armour?

23 Mar 10 — Elsewhere — No comments

According to the Telegraph, the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory are developing a new type of armour for vehicles:

When a threat from incoming fire is detected by the vehicle, the energy stored in the supercapacitor can be rapidly dumped onto the metal plating on the outside of the vehicle, producing a strong electromagnetic field.

Polarise the hull plating?

Vector Image Editing on the Mac

23 Mar 10 — Elsewhere — No comments

Jon Hicks has an in-depth examination of Adobe Fireworks alternatives (editors that handle combined pixel and vector-based images), including some I hadn’t heard of.

DrawIt looks like the most interesting to me:

Drawit is seems more aimed at the Fireworks market: vector drawing with bitmap effects. It’s a big step up from Acorn in terms of drawing capabilities, and (initially) it felt like using Keynote after years of Powerpoint. Remember that feeling?

Yes, I really do.