It is generally regarded that there are three primary properties of a software product: cost of development, performance (speed/memory etc) and software quality. It is believed that you can only ever obtain two of these properties at the cost of the remaining property e.g, you can have high performance and high quality but it won’t [...]
When I first started using version control software (originally SourceSafe, now Perforce), I used to have a large amount of changes over many files checked out all at once, which I would work on over a week or more and then check in at once. As I have become more experienced I have started to [...]
This may seem strange but in my experience it is true that the first few optimisation efforts on any un-optimised system tend to yeild high returns for low effort e.g, tweaking some compiler or linker settings in a few minutes. Further medium term efforts tend to suffer from diminishing returns e.g, rewriting critical sections in [...]
One of the things that universities don’t typically prepare students for is working as part of large teams e.g., ten or more individual developers. This under exposure to the large team working environment usually means that although a potential candidate is a good programmer, they may be totally unprepared for the typical large project [...]
Reading books to help develop your career seems to be falling out of fashion of late, especially in Software Engineering where websites, mailing list and blogs are used to fill the gap. I don’t think this is a completely healthy trend, as a lot of the best writing I’ve encountered on general software engineering, projects [...]