Our guest speaker will be III (pronounced "three"), an authority on Chartering. Project Chartering is one of the practices of Industrial XP. III advocates chartering for providing a good beginning for a any project. He will present examples from chartering done at HP for their XP-SIG. Check out the paper he wrote on chartering here:...

I don't like that STL is so very dependent on "compile-time polymorphism". If I've written some code that takes a forward-iterator parameter, I'd like to be able to pass in ANY of the STL iterators into that function without recompiling it or making that function into a template function. Ditto for various STL containers that have common...

We programmers read software much more often than we write it, but do we write for readability? Do we teach programmers how to read software?

We programmers read software much more often than we write it, but do we write for readability? Do we teach programmers how to read software?

Some people learn by doing. Some people (like me) learn by reading. I've been doing C++ for a long time, but I would say that I learned it by reading the C/C++ Users Journal and various books and other documentation. The parts of C++ that I learned "by doing" have to do with compiler limitations and library bugs. While the syntax and usage of a...

Some people learn by doing. Some people (like me) learn by reading. I've been doing C++ for a long time, but I would say that I learned it by reading the C/C++ Users Journal and various books and other documentation. The parts of C++ that I learned "by doing" have to do with compiler limitations and library bugs. While the syntax and usage of a...

The next meeting of BayXP will be Wednesday Nov. 17, 2004 (a week early to avoid Thanksgiving vacations). Jeff McKenna of www.netobjectives.com will be speaking informally on the planning game and retrospectives -- how they work together. Badging is required, so please try to arrive early. Time: November 17th 7:00 PM mixing; 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM...

The next meeting of BayXP will be Wednesday Nov. 17, 2004 (a week early to avoid Thanksgiving vacations). Jeff McKenna of www.netobjectives.com will be speaking informally on the planning game and retrospectives -- how they work together. Badging is required, so please try to arrive early. Time: November 17th 7:00 PM mixing; 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM...

Travis Griggs tested memory allocation and freeing in C (no garbage collection versus automatic garbage collection) and Smalltalk. His test generates and frees 20,000,000 small objects, with only 1,000 of them being "live" at any time. His results: 9.5 seconds: plain C allocing but never freeing [no gc] 9.5 seconds: plain C with Boehm Garbage...

Travis Griggs tested memory allocation and freeing in C (no garbage collection versus automatic garbage collection) and Smalltalk. His test generates and frees 20,000,000 small objects, with only 1,000 of them being "live" at any time. His results: 9.5 seconds: plain C allocing but never freeing [no gc] 9.5 seconds: plain C with Boehm Garbage...

More advice for dealing software people: if you offer an idea or suggestion to "debaters" (see previous blog entry), and they poke a dozen holes in it, that means that they're interested in it. Try to imagine that they are trying to help you, because many times this is their way of doing that. To move from debate into dialog, ask them to how to...

More advice for dealing software people: if you offer an idea or suggestion to "debaters" (see previous blog entry), and they poke a dozen holes in it, that means that they're interested in it. Try to imagine that they are trying to help you, because many times this is their way of doing that. To move from debate into dialog, ask them to how to...

Many people in the software biz respond to an attempt at conversation with a rebuttal. This isn't dialog, it's debate. It's one of the reasons software developers have developed a reputation for poor social skills. Do you do this? Here's a symptom: your replies to someone else often start with the word "but". Examples: Dialogger: "It was...

Many people in the software biz respond to an attempt at conversation with a rebuttal. This isn't dialog, it's debate. It's one of the reasons software developers have developed a reputation for poor social skills. Do you do this? Here's a symptom: your replies to someone else often start with the word "but". Examples: Dialogger: "It was...

Consider a back (or credit card) account that charges or credits interest based on the daily balance. They're not going to compute that interest every day, they're going to do that once a month when sending you your account statement / credit-card bill. What they are going to do is keep a log of transactions, and then figure out what the...