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. Usually he manages to p... [More]

Often I hear short meaningful statements that seem to make so much sense. I thought I’d note them down so I can remind myself of them later. Learn by doing. Self-organising and autonomous wins over managed. Be inspired and have a well defined vision. Work is not unenjoyable by definition. It takes... [More]

Most of us have worked on our own little side projects. Usually we have some inspirational moment where we conceive an idea and then go through a mental process to map out the project in our heads. At the end of it we have a new killer idea for a project. In mapping out the idea, we have thought a... [More]

Source control is really important. Without source control, we would be working with single revisions of code where older changes are lost as soon as newer changes are made. Without source control, you couldn’t simply go back in time to before you attempted to implement your own version of a divide... [More]

I’m currently sat here at Barcamp Blackpool and so far it has been an awesome event. There have been a number of interesting sessions varying from a custom made hardware device for playing an organ to an overview of using Amazon EC2 for hosting .NET code on Mono. My talk about code injection ... [More]

Some people think that solving the problem is the only thing that matters. Wrong. While solving the problem is key to building a successful product, a successful product is more than simply a solution to a problem. A great product makes you feel happy and actually want to use it. A really great pro... [More]

And now for something completely different. A programming language allows a human to talk to a computer, in the same way that a spoken language allows a human to talk to another human. Now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s consider what programming and spoken languages have in common. The... [More]