Uncertainty is normally seen as something you must either suppress or avoid. Of this many people appear, well, certain. That you should embrace it and use it to help determine schedule and design is not immediately obvious.

Generality and reusability sound like such good qualities to have in code that is easy to forget not only how hard they are to achieve, but also that without the more modest qualities of simplicity and utility how little value they may hold.

After a lot of trepidation because of bad press, I've rapidly come to prefer Windows 8 over Windows 7. Because an equivalent-horsepower Mac is 3 times the cost of a Windows 8 machine, I'm moving back to Windows.

After two years of cogitation on Scala, the print version of the book is ready! (The Kindle version might take another month or two...).

For the last year and a half, Dianne Marsh and I have been working on an introductory Scala book.

Having problems with using NFS on Windows 7? Here's a very simple solution.

The earlier workshop came about because of a last-minute opportunity, thus the short notice. Both follow the open style that I've been developing in recent years.

An account of my first Gathering for Gardner, a conference for recreational mathematicians, magicians, puzzlers, philosophers, and other curious types.

In 2004, I posted "Why salary bonus and other incentives fail to meet their objectives". Here's a great RSA presentation by Dan Pink about WHY that's true.

Abstraction is a question of less over more. But is it also a question of high over low? It turns out that the common way of describing abstractions in terms of high-level and low-level hides a number of assumptions, some of which suggest that we often look at abstraction the wrong way up (or down).

What can you learn from testing? When you look beyond the red and the green, the fail and the pass, you can learn a lot more about the nature of the code and the nature of the problem domain. And there is a lot to learn — software development is called knowledge work for a reason.

If you do any HTML/XML processing, you've probably heard of this powerful and useful package. Download the latest beta and run it on your code to help debug it and make sure it does what you need!

My old computer died and I have replaced it with a System 76 Gazelle Pro laptop running Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot”. In this article I review the hardware & the OS. This is an unsolicited and unpaid review.

I'm test-infected and that's why one of my first exciting Scala discoveries was ScalaTest

Life and complacency took me away from my first 'love'.