I’m the first to agree that concurrency is a hard problem to solve. I have bad memories involving C, POSIX threads and mutexes that I’d rather just forget. In the end, dealing with threads sucks, we’re all just waiting for the abstraction, right? There has been some positive progress in .NET land ... [More]

Every company you work for always seems to have a horror story about something that happened before your arrival. Things like current production old legacy systems that used mode="SQLServer"  for session state and then stored a ton of database reads in session to cache them. The on... [More]

Today I realised that every time I hear the phrase if it isn't broken, don't fix it I feel kind of uncomfortable. I fully understand the notion: the process yields the results we want, so why bother?  As it is being said, I detect the whatever works attitude emanating from the person saying i... [More]

I was thinking to myself the other day, "you know, I haven't written any socket code in years". A few weeks before I'd been thinking the same thing about threads. It's probably a good thing that I haven't, sockets and threads can get complicated and there are now powerful libraries built o... [More]

It’s not uncommon to find a software developer who works on their own side-project outside of work. It’s a great way of keeping your skills up-to-date and some developers even aim to build a business from it. It’s also not uncommon to see these projects start out with tons of optimism and gradually... [More]

It’s not long after swallowing the unit testing pill that your appreciation for the colour green starts to increase. It soon reaches the point where you want a pretty little green light for every method. However, when you set out to test as much as you can you quickly run into some awkward issues. ... [More]

It was Aristotle who said "All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind", but what is it about paid jobs that make this the case? To find the answer let’s consider the differences between paid and unpaid jobs. One summer I got a 5 day job working at what could only be described as an ex-bo... [More]

Why do we have systems with millions of lines of code? Every so often you’ll hear about someone who starts their new job only to discover that the system they’re now maintaining consists of many millions of lines of code. Millions. Now, are you telling me that these systems need a million lines o... [More]

Back in high school, I remember writing the second version of my IDE program. This was the beginning of 2004 and I had very little experience of writing any sizable piece of software. IDE2 would allow multiple users to connect to a central server where they could work together on code. It would als... [More]

Meet Roofus. He’s a professional painter. He paints because he’s discovered that paintings sell pretty well and it affords him the finer things in life. Roofus gets particularly stressed when producing his work, and sometimes he’s not even sure if the painting will work out. Usual... [More]