Thinking Inside a Bigger Box

One of the blogs I enjoy reading is that of Jason Yip: You’d think with all my vide game experience that I’d be more prepared for this (excellent title!). He usually writes short and sweet posts that gets a point across in just a few sentences. Here are a few of my favorites:

• The method where people talk to each other and trust each other and build things incrementally and… (I’ll probably blog about this at some later time)
• The Goals, Questions, and Metrics of User Stories
• One adopted improvement per person per week
• What’s the matter with that person: On reacting sensibly to stressful situations (much longer than average)

It’s a blog well worth subscribing to.

Watched a show about Ada Lovelace today, and I thought about all the great names we should remember better. It would be so cool to have posters of these. I am just including dead ones. It feels kinda creepy to have living heroes.

• Ada Lovelace (why do great mathematicians die young?)


• Alan Turing (of course)


• Edger Dijkstra (pioneered software and computer science as a discipline)


• Grace Murray Hopper (championing accessible program writing)


• Kristen Nygaard (as far as I know, he was one of the first people to be concerned about the impact of computing upon society)

1. Attributes. Keeps getting better ‘n better. Check out Extensible C#, Clemens Vasters new demos, and the underutilized ContextBoundObject


2. ADO.NET. The ADO.NET model for modeling and transporting data hits right on the spot.


3. Better FFI. P/Invoke wins against JNI, hands down (too bad it is probably overused, though)


4. Not EJBs! Getting rid of the defunct EJB model saves a lot of headaches.


5. Better UI. For the user, that is, not the developer!

1. Open Source Community. The number of excellent open-source tools for Java is staggering. Look at HSqlDb, BeanShell, Eclipse, Recoder, JGraph, Tomcat, JBoss, and many more. More importantly, the Java community has proven much more interested in doing it the open-source way.


2. Eclipse. Already mentioned, but it deserves a point of its own. Eclipse is a better IDE than VS.NET!


3. Checked Exceptions.


4. Less Native Code & more code reliability. .NET still has some weird crashes. Despite much improvement, I have still experienced DLL-Hell light.


5. More mature libraries.

1. The Psychology of Computer Programming (Jerry Weinberg)


2. The Pragmatic Programmer (Andrew Hunt and Dave Thomas) - from Journeyman to Master (the view of the software professional as a craftman is the only thing that will save the business!)


3. PeopleWare (Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister)


4. Extreme Programming Explained (Kent Beck)


5. After the Gold Rush (Steve McConnell)