How to work an 8-hour day

One of the things I decided when I started working was that I was not going to be one of those guys who worked 12 hours a day for a company (if I ever become an entrepreneur, all bets are off since I’m working for myself). So far, I’ve been pretty successful, and I’ve noticed [...]

6 Ways to Increase Your Confidence As You Code

One of the key requirements for being able to reliably update software is the confidence that the changes you are making are safe. The amount of confidence required increases with the complexity of the system.
In my day job I work on a real-time messaging system that can have very, very little downtime. As the service [...]

Thoughts on Process: Automation (and examples)

If a process, or part of a process, can be automated it should be. For example, in a project at work, part of our process is to make sure that every dialog present in the English resources of an MFC application is also present in all the other dialogs. We do this manually by loading [...]

Thoughts on Process: How much is enough

I’ve been thinking a lot about process lately, specifically how much process is enough, and how to automate things I do regularly. First of all, I think I’m lucky to work in a place that does not have a burdensome process in order to get anything done.
At its core, process is necessary because we as [...]

Managing Complexity - Part 2

Further musings on complexity and software

Managing Complexity

Software developers and managing complexity