Technology
A long time ago, my family took a trip to Expo ‘86 in Vancouver, with stop offs in San Francisco and Los Angeles. In LA, we went on the Universal studio tour, something which I basically have no memory of. I did get a memento, though—a poster entitled “Murphy’s Computer Law” with a bunch of humorous computing “laws” on it. This poster went up in my room, accompanied me to college and has been in most of my offices at Microsoft. However, a few years ago, a corner ripped off in a move. Then while it was sitting around waiting...
In my “Learning and Teaching” post last week, I talked about the different stages of learning, from “unconscious incompetence” up to “unconscious competence.” It occurred to me today, though, that there really are different levels within those levels and, in particular, there are some very distinct levels of incompetence that I’ve encountered in my nearly (yikes!) two decades of working in the industry. The reason why the levels of incompetence are somewhat more important than the various levels of competence, it seems to me, is that incompetent people are often a very real threat to the stability of teams that...
..and they are: Programmers who want to write an operating system Programmers who want to write a compiler Programmers who want to write a database It’s not that every programmer ever actually works on one of these, just that every programmer seems to dream of doing one of these things. It’s the primary reason why things like Linux exist. Yes, open source, blah, blah, blah, OS choices, blah, blah, blah, evil Microsoft, blah, blah, blah. But I would bet my bottom dollar that 9 out...
Jeff Atwood’s little entry on cheatsheets sure brought back some memories... I loved Beagle Brothers. As a general measure of comparison, I think Beagle Brothers had more cool in one little tip/trick box than Google has ever had with their cute variations on the Google logo. Definitely one of the things I look back on with fondness…
I’ve also thought about trying to create a VB.NET language cheat sheet one of these days, but it’s on that list of “things to do when I have time.” Yeah, right…
I’m catching up on my blog reading and just plowed my way through Joel’s curmudgeonly “old guy” rant about The Perils of JavaSchools. I don’t have a lot to say about the central thesis of his rant — I’ve always been of two minds about the efficacy of the Darwinian theory of weeding the weak out through hazing-type classes — but there was an analogy that caught my eye:
Heck, in 1900, Latin and Greek were required subjects in college, not because they served any purpose, but because they were sort of considered an obvious requirement for educated people. In some...
I think Rico’s spot on when he says that the real way you win the performance war is 5% at a time. Actually, I think he’s been overly optimistic — a lot of the time, it seems like you win the performance war 1% at a time. It’s much more like trench warfare than blitzkreig.
There’s also a larger idea at work here. Rico’s point is that in a mature product, you shouldn’t be able to come up with a huge performance win in most cases because, if you can, why didn’t somebody think of it before? The thing is, this...
In one of the comments to the “Introducing LINQ” entry that I wrote, Unilynx wrote:
Sounds like what we've been doing for five years already :)
This was a comment that came up several times at the PDC from various sources: “What’s so revolutionary about this stuff? We’ve been doing this kind of thing for years!” On the one hand, what’s unique about LINQ is how it’s built, it’s openness and flexibility, and it’s unification of data querying across domains. But on the other hand, yeah, let’s be honest: as Newton would say, if we’re seeing further, it’s only because we’re...
In the Micronews (our internal newspaper), there was an article talking about teaching English that used the following quote from George Orwell:
To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.
As I read it, though, it occured to...
A long, long time ago I riffed a little bit on the question of “why do we have VB and C#?” The idea I was trying to struggle towards was that even though two languages may share many similar constructs and be able to express roughly the same thing, design decisions on little things can make a big difference in the experience of using the language. Now I learn from Dave Remy that this is hardly a new idea and even has a name: the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. There’s even a discussion about how it might or might not apply to...
As we move towards Beta2 and are preparing for the headlong rush towards RTM (release to manufacturing), I’ve been lucky enough to be able to carve out some time to start doing some research for ideas that might show up past Whidbey. We’re not talking anything formal here, no feature lists or anything like that. Just the opportunity to spend some time noodling with some ideas on the whiteboard and fiddling with some prototype ideas. It’s one of the perks of having been around a long time – especially since most people on the team are still totally heads-down on shipping.
One of...
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