Category: programming

Designer vs. Programmer: Fight!

I spend a lot of my work days doing both design and programming, which is fine, except that the two disciplines are very different. In fact, they’re downright contradictory at times.

The devolution of a programmer.

A sizable amount of my working life has been spent processing large quantities of text: generating it, reformatting it, parsing it, displaying it. Over the years, my approach to this sort of thing has evolved.

Shooting code.

The really neat thing about these games (for the coders in the audience) is that the bullet patterns are not predetermined, but are instead generated using an engine that reads an XML document.

Dysfunctional Programming.

Ah, yes. Now I remember why I’m trying to get out of software.

Good night, eclectic. We hardly knew ye.

I just wanted to give a shout out and thank you to Leigh for teaching me so much, so painlessly.

“Resourceundle” is not a word in any language.

There’s nothing more fun than deciphering other people’s code. Especially when their Javadoc is in German. Poorly spelled German.

Mozilla.org announces launch of the Mozilla Foundation.

It’s about time.

//TODO: trust your code.

In any given programming project, the source code is the only trustworthy document.

As God is my witness, I’ll never use JTextField again!

The really sweet thing about JFormattedTextField is the way it beats JTextField as a general-purpose text editing component.

Vince McMahon is the new manager at the JBoss Group.

In true JBoss fashion, everyone involved seems to have made a concerted effort to talk as much trash as possible during the whole affair.

Time keeps on slipping into the future.

There are days, like today, when I really wonder.

In case Vim wasn’t awesome enough already.

Yegappan Lakshmanan’s Taglist plugin does pretty much everything I ever dreamed of my own script doing, and does it for every language that Exuberant Ctags supports

Getting back up on that ol’ horse.

In going back to programming in Java, though, I’ve noticed something surprising: I already miss Python.

And a beautiful world it is, too.

Right on the heels of my up-close-and-personal encounter with text encodings comes Tim Bray with a painless and lovely introduction to Unicode.

The world beyond 7-bit ASCII

I got to spend some time last night and this morning learning the differences between straight ASCII, ISO-8859-1, UTF-8, and whatever encoding it is that the Mac uses.

Katas, études, three-man weaves

Dave Thomas (the Pragmatic Programmer, not the Beloved Burgermeister) has been thinking about the value of a disciplined practice regimen in programming.

Don’t believe anything anyone says today.

Among programmers, your pranks must not only be funny, they must compile and pass all unit tests before being checked in and posted to the production server.