I was explaining this to some junior programmers the other day and it’s worth repeating. Failure is fine in software engineering, in fact it is expected: I get nervous if something works first time these days as I know my limits and expect to make mistakes. However I think that new programmers don’t always realise [...]
Yesterday I wrote about optimisation work flow and in this post I will be discussing why you should not preemptively optimise your program’s source code. You may wonder what could possibly be wrong with preemptively optimising the source code, it just makes your program faster right? And that is the trap: while it does make [...]
I believe the key to optimising any program is measurement: not writing l33t code which seems to be what a lot of programmers think optimisation is! The optimisation process is all about finding the slow parts of your program and speeding those slow parts up by refactoring your source code to meet your target performance [...]
Jani Hartikainen has written an excellent post in reply to my earlier post about teaching software engineering students memory management, and his post is well worth a read. I started off writing a comment on his post as a reply but I ended up writing more than I expected as I refined my ideas.
I agree [...]
I’ve really needed to get round to learning a powerful object oriented scripted or interpreted programming language to replace windows batch files (which I currently use) for a while now. As Microsoft seems determined to gut their functionality with each new Windows release and I find myself wanting more functionality and power than batch scripts [...]