I’ve been doing a lot of work with Git lately and have done a lot of thinking about version control systems. I think our analogy of a ‘tree’ to represent the life-cycle of software versions is no longer relevant. Today, trees and branches do not adequately represent what version control systems are supposed to do. [...]
Browsing Posts in Software Development
Subversion will not die in the foreseeable future in the enterprise world due to GPL licensing in the popular DVCSs.
Humans have a hard time understanding the concept of ‘random’. A great example of this that I love to use is to get someone to quickly pick the first ‘random’ number they think of between 1 and 100 (you can do this right now). If the number was truly random, a pick of 2 or [...]
Performance Tuning is one of those black arts in programming. It takes skill to do it properly. Often people end up attempting to optimize the wrong things for performance. As the great computer science wizard, Donald Knuth put it: “We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the [...]
The Maritime Dev Con was a huge success. About 95 people total attended the event making it a huge success for developers in the Maritimes. I had a great time at the event and met a bunch of really cool people. The presentations I gave went well with a number of attendees. I’m putting up [...]
There is going to be a maritime developers conference coming up on June 18th in Moncton. It is going to be a great opportunity to have developers from Moncton and other areas of the maritimes get together and learn a bit about other languages and technologies they might not have been exposed to. All of [...]
Problem. Bugs happen. The common solution to this problem is to fix the bug and release a patch. Version 1.0 has bugs, version 1.0.1 fixes those bugs. Inevitably at some point in time you will need to put together a list of all of the changes in a release. For me, this needs to go [...]
Two of the most useful tools to a developer outside of their development environment are version control and bug tracking systems. Version control allows tracking of changes to the product and allows for branching and merging. Bug tracking systems allow for tracking issues with the product whether they be bugs or enhancements. Even though these [...]
As a whole, the Web is moving more toward REST based APIs. Who is going to be consuming the Web Service a human or a machine? REST can be consumed by humans easily but WSDL is still the best for machines to consume. REST may be the best choice for the Web but there are many other uses for Web Services besides the Web.
The Zune Bug A few weeks ago I heard of this issue where the Microsoft Zune crashes and won’t startup on December 31, 2008. The reason for this? A bug in the software that handled leap years. There are lots of articles on the original issue. When I heard of this issue, I originally thought [...]
