There is a meme going around that it is "an order of magnitude more difficult" to write a class that is "re-usable". That didn't seem right to me, so I decided to list the rules one could follow to write re-usable classes. Once I got up to about nine or ten rules, I decided that it might not be as simple as I thought. Still, compared to all the...

Is there a pattern to stock market activity relative to who is president? I got year-end Dow Jones numbers from this web-site (http://www.cfainstitute.org/pressroom/overview/cfa40yr_timeline.html) and graphed them. The only pattern I've noticed is that for most presidents (Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, GWBush), the Dow ends lower after their...

Is there a pattern to stock market activity relative to who is president? I got year-end Dow Jones numbers from this web-site (http://www.cfainstitute.org/pressroom/overview/cfa40yr_timeline.html) and graphed them. The only pattern I've noticed is that for most presidents (Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, GWBush), the Dow ends lower after their...

I've gotten a back-log of books to read, with more arriving Real Soon Now. If you're developing software in Java, C++, C#, or some other object oriented language, you need to buy these books for your professional toolkit. Refactoring to Patterns by Joshua Kerievsky Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers JUnit Recipes:...

I've gotten a back-log of books to read, with more arriving Real Soon Now. If you're developing software in Java, C++, C#, or some other object oriented language, you need to buy these books for your professional toolkit. Refactoring to Patterns by Joshua Kerievsky Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers JUnit Recipes:...

Writing software to do something that hasn't been done before is a knowledge creation activity. In many respects, it is like artistic creation. And therein lies the rub. Artistic creation is a messy activity involving trying some things and throwing away the things that don't work. Inspiration does not respect age or seniority. Sparks fly from...

Writing software to do something that hasn't been done before is a knowledge creation activity. In many respects, it is like artistic creation. And therein lies the rub. Artistic creation is a messy activity involving trying some things and throwing away the things that don't work. Inspiration does not respect age or seniority. Sparks fly from...

Good paper - Dynamic Languages-ready for the next challenges, by design by David Ascher. Note that Smalltalk is one of the first dynamic languages, and lives on in multiple commercial and open-source versions. And don't forget Objective-C, which was initially commercial but now is open-sourced. [Aside: why don't the maintainers of gcc take the...

Good paper - Dynamic Languages-ready for the next challenges, by design by David Ascher. Note that Smalltalk is one of the first dynamic languages, and lives on in multiple commercial and open-source versions. And don't forget Objective-C, which was initially commercial but now is open-sourced. [Aside: why don't the maintainers of gcc take the...

1. There are studies/statistics that say unit testing finds 70% of the defects. 2. A unit test provides an example of what a piece of code is supposed to do. Going through the code in the debugger only tells you what it is doing, not what it is supposed to do. 3. You can run hundreds of unit tests in the same amount of time it takes to go...

1. There are studies/statistics that say unit testing finds 70% of the defects. 2. A unit test provides an example of what a piece of code is supposed to do. Going through the code in the debugger only tells you what it is doing, not what it is supposed to do. 3. You can run hundreds of unit tests in the same amount of time it takes to go...

Jerry Weinberg's Advice for Software Development Managers. Mary Poppendieck on increasing productivity [profits], quality and speed archived web-interview and slides.

Jerry Weinberg's Advice for Software Development Managers. Mary Poppendieck on increasing productivity [profits], quality and speed archived web-interview and slides.

Top 25 new stories of 2003-2004 that you didn't see: Project Censored. (#4) High Uranium Levels Found in Troops and Civilians quotes: Uranium is a chemically and radiologically toxic element, clinically proven to be a cause of various types of cancer and congenital malformations (birth defects). Internal contamination of uranium is responsible...

Top 25 new stories of 2003-2004 that you didn't see: Project Censored. (#4) High Uranium Levels Found in Troops and Civilians quotes: Uranium is a chemically and radiologically toxic element, clinically proven to be a cause of various types of cancer and congenital malformations (birth defects). Internal contamination of uranium is responsible...