A few days ago I saw a documentary on Discovery HD Theater called "BMW: An Expression of Joy" where artist Robin Rhode attached paint spray nozzles to the tires of a BMW Z4 and used the vehicle as a paintbrush on a large canvas. You can see the result and more info on this at the [...]
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I'd like to thank JD Meier for reminding me of the importance of small wins this morning through his blog post "Don't Always Go for the Long Shot". It's a great reminder that success doesn't come all at once.
Everyone wants to be successful. Entrepreneurs want successful businesses. Athletes want to win. Engineers want to build [...]
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Jeff Atwood of the Coding Horror blog posted his latest on reuse with an article entitled "Don't Reinvent The Wheel, Unless You Plan on Learning More About Wheels", in which Atwood advocates reinventing the wheel as a "call to arms for deeply educating yourself about all the existing solutions".
Avoiding the reinvention of the proverbial wheel [...]
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I believe in software reuse. If you want to release a product in today's world then I believe it's too costly to not reuse as much software and technology as you can within your given context.
Granted, reusing software is not always the best solution, but more often than not it is a very strong [...]
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I'm a fan of analogies. While sometimes they can be like a bad joke, othertimes they can be an effective means for communicating a complex topic.
Software Development is one such topic, and I often deal with trying to communicate the challenges of software with those who have little or no experience in it, so finding good [...]
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After reading Jeff Attwood's post "We Are Typists First, Programmers Second" and hearing my co-workers ask me how fast I typed for the umpteenth time, I decided to take one of those typing tests and found out I average around 100 words per minute (wpm). Not bad.
The last time I took a typing test like that was 15 [...]
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Snippets in Visual Studio 2005/2008 are probably an underused feature, but Matt Manela aims to make them a more productive experience and has released a Snippet Designer for Visual Studio .NET 2008 on Codeplex. From his blog:
The Snippet Designer was started as an intern project of mine during the Summer of 2006. The idea was to make snippet files (which [...]
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I came across this via the Agile Advice blog:
Bob C. Martin (Uncle Bob to you and me) suggested, in his “quintessence” keynote at the Agile2008 conference that he had the perfect metric for code quality. Cyclomatic complexity and others were interesting mostly to those who invented them, etc. His answer was brilliant, and was easily [...]
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Before Tropical Storm Fay's mandatory visitor evacuation forced me to leave earlier than planned, I was enjoying some great weather and boating in Key Largo for my birthday weekend.
I go there to get away from the hectic for a few days, sometimes even unplugging from the world completely by disconnecting from Internet, TV, and phone. It [...]
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What makes a better software engineer?
This is a question I've asked myself often over the years, primarily because I'm constantly asked to teach others how I "do things". The problem is that I don't know how I do things – I just do it, like Nike. No really, I once said that during a radio [...]
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