Category Archives: Software Development

Never make assumptions about performance

The importance of measuring performance changes is a topic that has been covered by others smarter and more experienced than me, but I have a recent simple tale.

I’ve simplified the code quite a bit in order to demonstrate the issue. Suppose I have a wrapper around an image (it has many more attributes):

   1: class Picture
   2: {
   3:     Image _image;
   4:     string _path;
   5: 
   6:     public Image Photo
   7:     {
   8:         get
   9:         {
  10:             if (_image==null && !string.IsNullOrEmpty(_path))
  11:             {
  12:                 _image = Bitmap.FromFile(_path);
  13:             }
  14:             return _image;
  15:         }
  16:     }
  17: 
  18: }

I had this and a view that loading about 2,700 of these into a customized ListView control at program startup. On a cold start (where none of the pictures were in the disk’s cache), it would take 27 seconds. Unacceptable.

What to do?

My first thought was to load the pictures asynchronously. I wrapped Bitmap.FromFile() into a function and called it asynchronously. When it was done, it fired an event that percolated up to the top.

Well, I spent about 30 minutes implementing that and ran it–horrible. The list showed up immediately, but it was unusable. The problem? Dumping 2,700 items into the ThreadPool queue is a problem. It doesn’t create 2,700 threads, but it causes enough problems to not be a viable option.

Asynchronicity is still the answer, though. But it’s at a different level. Instead of loading the individual images asynchronously, I skipped loading the images when creating the list control and instead launched a thread to load all the images and update them when done. The list loads in under a second, and the pictures show up little by little after that.

Measure, measure, measure. And pay attention.

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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 grows and sees more traffic, the amount of downtime shrinks. We start to worry now if upgrades take longer than 5 minutes. (It’s almost to the point where we’ll need redundant systems in order to do maintenance).

To upgrade this software, I have to have an awful lot of confidence in the code changes made. Sometimes that confidence varies.

What to do to gain confidence:

1. Consistent process

Having a set of rules to follow is a fundamental requirement of good software engineering. I’m not going to discuss what the process should be, but you should have one that works well.

Why is this important?

Programmers like order. We like well-defined problems where we can see the end from the beginning. We don’t like haziness, indeterminism, or too many choices.

A process nails down the unknowns–it tells you very specifically what the next thing to do is. A good process leaves no room for doubt.

A good development, testing, and deployment process is the first step to building confidence in what you’re doing.

For my messaging system example, here’s a short summary of what our upgrade process is. We didn’t just come up with it–it evolved as our business grew and the requirements grew with it.

  1. All unit and integration tests pass (we have about 2200 automated tests for this that can run in about 4 minutes)
  2. We’ve run it on staging server for a few weeks with no issues.
  3. All new features have been tested on the staging server
  4. Formal change document has been submitted and approved.
  5. Formal test results documented.
  6. Previous version backed up.
  7. Perform upgrade
  8. Monitor system (including custom automated monitoring tools)

At any point, I know where we are in the process and what needs to be done next. Sure, there may be details within these steps that require thought and creativity, but the process guides it all and makes us more confident that we’re not performing ad-hoc operations.

2. Unit Testing

There are other types of testing, but it all starts at the unit level, with simple tests that exercise your code line by line, function by function, feature by feature. I recently wrote a few thoughts about unit testing. Unit testing is where you can see the overall wellness of your code–you want that green bar!

Without unit testing, how do you know the code you’re writing is doing what it should? do you just run it and push it through its paces? This is highly inefficient for most types of code. You’ll run out of steam before you start getting close to edge cases.

The fact is that automated unit tests are a baseline for confidence in your code. You need to be able demonstrate time and again that your code performs well.

This all presupposes that you are writing good unit tests. If you’re not sure, start studying. I don’t buy the arguments about lulling developers into a false sense of security–sure, that can happen, but having good developers who understand this is a prerequisite.

If you’re not unit testing–what is your basis for confidence in your code?

3. Code Coverage

Code coverage goes hand-in-hand with unit testing as a good way to automatically discover what areas of your program are in need of more testing. I’ve found that one of the biggest barriers to unit testing a large C++ application we have is that we have no way of easily measuring test coverage. If we had time, we could definitely to the analysis ourselves, or we could spend a lot of money to get a C++ instrumentation profiler, but these are slow and very tedious to use in my experience.

In .Net, use the tools to your advantage.

The psychological benefits of seeing 75-, 90-, 95-, even 100-percent coverage are immense. You know that every line of the program has at least been touched.

Of course, most code coverage tools analyze line coverage, not path coverage. Combine  complexity analysis with code coverage to determine which functionality should probably have better testing. There are plenty of free and commercial tools that will give you cyclomatic complexity, among other metrics.

Use other analysis tools like FxCop to make sure your other ducks are in a row. It can find easy-to-overlook problems like not validating arguments of public methods, which can then lead to more unit tests and more coverage to achieve.

4. Automation

Take yourself out of the equation as much as possible. The point of a process is to be repeatable–it’s like automating yourself. Not only should unit testing be automated (thankfully, most testing frameworks handle this easily), but so should coverage and quality analyses.

What about deployment? Automate it. Documentation generation? CD master creation? Web upload? E-mail notification? Automate them all. Production builds should be invoked with a single command.

Working on boring, repeatable code? Automate it with code-gen.

The bottom line is: Don’t waste your brain cells on stuff that is highly repeatable, especially when it is prone to mistakes.

5. Code Review

Last week, a rather serious bug was discovered in some of our software (not released yet, thankfully, but close). The bug was mine, and I knew exactly what the problem was, but instead of designing a solution by myself, I brought a co-worker into the discussion just to bounce ideas off of. He had great suggestions, and made me think of things I might not necessarily have thought of on my own. We both went over the code and came to a solution that was simple and acceptable to both of us. The confidence level was much higher with this than it would have been otherwise.

This story is repeated daily by programmers throughout the world. Code review is a practice based on the simple notion that there is no one person smart enough to get it correct the first time.

Even if you’re working alone, which I often do, it pays huge dividends to regularly review your code with an eye for finding trouble. If you see any weakness at all, don’t ignore it–fix it. If you’re reviewing your own code, it’s a good idea to wait a bit after the time you wrote it. This gives your brain a chance to forget a little bit about it. Then, if you find you can’t understand it anymore, it’s either too complicated, or (if it fundamentally really is complicated) you need better comments.

Reviewing with other people has more benefit, however. Not everybody thinks the same way about problems. People have different experience, different expertise and focus, and you can’t take advantage of that if you don’t let them teach you. Even if the other people have less expertise than you, it is still beneficial (assuming they have some basic competency that they can bring to the discussion).

Once you let other people tear into your code (nicely, I hope), your confidence can be higher because you can add the confidence other people have in it (once your problems are corrected, of course!)

6. Repeatable Experiences

In the end, one of the best ways to increase your confidence in yourself, your code, and your practices is to have the evidence of repeated experiences behind you. You’re always learning, and that learning contributes to improvements in processes, testing, and your personal coding practices. Once you learn what works, especially during tricky upgrades, you can go into the next trial with increased confidence that you’re doing something right.

Have any other ideas on increasing confidence? Leave them in the comments!

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Unit testing benefits programmers who are already good

In order to kick my unit testing skills up a notch, I’ve been reading a lot about it lately. Today I had the thought: “Unit testing only helps already-good programmers.”

My reasoning is that bad programmers are going to write bad tests, or not enough test cases, or bad test cases, or won’t take the effort to refactor their code when necessary, or won’t realize their code reeks, and so on and so forth.

The message from unit testing, and the XP camp in general, is that well-factored, object-oriented, testable code is key. But don’t those criteria presuppose some fairly intense skills on the part of the programmers? Merely introducing unit-testing into your processes won’t automatically improve the quality of code if someone has no clue.

This is a depressing line of thought. It’s not entirely true, however.

It IS possible that enforcing a rule on unit tests will “inspire” inexperienced developers to improve their code. Once they see the beauty of automated unit testing, hopefully some will realize that their code was NOT testable, NOT pretty, NOT well-factored, and start taking steps to change that. The knowledge to do that (why and how), however, will have to come from somewhere else. And since they’re not a good programmer, will they do this?

For these people, then, unit testing is of little benefit–chances are the code is of such low quality that the tests will just conform instead of try to break it.

You can’t teach someone the vision of unit testing without teaching the vision of a lot of other things as well. It doesn’t make sense otherwise.

A programmer who already understands how to build well-factored code is going to use unit tests in an entirely different way than someone who doesn’t understand them. To these people, it’s a way of verifying that it works to spec, and that it’s safe to change the implementation details without destroying the system.

I got into unit testing because I’m a good developer. It didn’t make me a good developer–it made me a better developer. (I said good developer, not great. I’m good because I realize that I always need to improve, and I take steps to do so, not because I’m a genius.)

That last paragraph and parentheses deserves more attention. How do you define a good programmer? Are they innately good, or are they good because they do certain things? Do you unit test because you’re a good programmer, or does the act of unit testing make you a good programmer? Is there a paradox here? Are both true? Neither?

Obviously, there aren’t just two kinds of programmers: 1) good and 2) bad. There is a spectrum. Obviously, again, just doing something doesn’t mean you’re automatically good or better, either. So I think you have to unit test because you’re a good programmer (or someone is forcing you, which is a different topic altogether) already and not the other way around.

I believe being a good programmer must come from within you. Becoming a better programmer can be done with the help of education, tools, and processes.

(Unit testing is just the topic I’m thinking about lately–you could replace it with any practice and the ideas are still the same.)

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.Net Reflector

Lutz Roeder’s .Net Reflector has been discussed on many blogs before, but I want to give it an additional plug. I recently had to emulate some C# serial-port code in our C++ app. The .Net SerialPort class is great, easy-to-use, and works well. Unfortunately, we’re using a C++ serial port library that does not support all the possible features. Fortunately, we have the source code and can easily extend it. Unfortunately, I’m not too familiar with serial port programming, and the .Net functionality does not all obviously map to the Win32 API in every respect.

Enter Reflector. It was trivial to poke into the .Net assemblies and see what the SerialPort class was doing under the covers and then use the correct Win32 functionality in our app.

There are also a ton of plugins available.

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Fighting Brain Rot

Alex Shalman has a great post at zenhabits about how to avoid letting your brain decay into apathy and atrophy. It’s a great call to action, to find ways of self-improvement. I think the behaviors listed here dovetail very nicely with the attributes of highly effective programmers.

By continuing to do as we always have, the quality of results will be the same as always. Only when we step out of our comfort zones, and push ourselves to improve, will we gain useful new experiences, knowledge, and ideas.

I think the methods of expanding the mind are highly applicable to software developers. I just have a little bit of commentary on each one.

11. Reading – I think I would have put this at #1. It’s the easiest way of cramming information into your skull. It’s the most efficient method of information transfer, and that’s our bread-and-butter as programmers, so we should become expert at it.

10. Writing – We write code for a living, not necessarily prose, but communication is key to so many areas in life, that learning how to write effectively is critical to most careers. For myself, I definitely find it easier to express myself in writing than in-person. Doing this well becomes a critical ability.

9. Puzzles – Developing a large software project is in many ways like an enormous software project. It’s so large, though, that we can’t comprehend it all at the same time. But practicing other types of puzzles can train our brains to look for patterns and to develop new, creative ways of thinking. My favorite offline puzzle is the New York Times Crossword, but I enjoy the occasional sudoku.

8. Mathematics – a good understanding of boolean logic, prepositional calculus, discrete mathematics, asymptotic notation, etc. are great things for developers to have. A general understanding of algebra, calculus, trigonometry, and statistics also comes in handy more-than-occasionally. Another valuable idea that comes out of mathematical understanding is the idea of precision in thought and rigorousness in testing or understanding your software–think loop invariants.

7. Painting – I am definitely not an artist by any means, but the underlying principle of some kind of artistic self-expression is important. The creative side of your brain must be regularly exercised. For me, this is in the form of building Legos.

6. Cooking – I initially found this to be a peculiar choice, but it makes more sense when I ponder it. Cooking is at once creative and precise. Not only does it use all the senses, but it requires you to think on your feet and be very, very organized and detail oriented, especially when you start cooking for more people. Planning and execution both become huge issues.

5. Music – I wholeheartedly agree, and I’ll even go out on a limb and say that you need to listen to lots of genres of music, especially classical. Why classical? Because it exhibits more musical complexity than all others. It doesn’t minimize various musical aspects (variation, melody, harmony, tempo, timbre, i.e.) for the sake of a single one (i.e., rhythm).

4.Poetry – I used to write fiction and poetry in high school and earlier, but it’s been quite a while. I do remember it being quite the exercise to compose sonnets–it forces you to be extremely creative with grammar, syntax, meaning, vocabulary, and more.

3. Meditate – This is an art I need to learn more about. I find I do this automatically in some situations where I’m not otherwise preoccupied (the shower), and I can solve a question I’ve had. I find that NOT doing something is as important as doing something in many cases. When I’m faced with an especially thorny problem at work, it really helps to just write down my thoughts about it and let it sit for a few days while I think about it in my off moments. Most of the time, I can come back and have a better solution than if I had started right away.

2. Learn a language –

A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing. – Alan Perlis

The original article obviously means foreign spoken languages, which I definitely agree with. I speak Italian, and the insights it’s given into my own native English are quite valuable. If you’re a careful student, knowing two languages definitely forces you to think about the meaning of words and constructs. It’s much harder to take things for granted.

I think the same is true of programming languages–knowing more than one helps your mind think about a problem in different ways. Once you understand functional programming, for example, you will never look at programming the same way again.

1. Question Everything – This is analogous to love of learning in my Effective Programmers essay. It’s not being a jerk and denigrating everybody else’s ideas. It’s asking yourself continual “Why” questions in order to understand the issue.

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Multiple-Item Clipboard a good idea?

Jeff Atwood laments the single-item nature of the Windows clipboard, and points out utilities that can expand the capabilities to multiple items. I think that’s a great power tool to have, but I’m not sure having a multiple-item clipboard is really the best thing.

I think one of the strengths of the clipboard is its single-mindedness. You always know that the thing you’ve copied is what you’ll paste (even if it is stored in multiple formats in the clipboard, it’s al conceptually the same). Once you expand the clipboard to contain multiple items, will the average user be able to handle a menu popping up asking which item to paste? No, probably not. That’s why the utility he mentions only pops up that menu when you hit it’s special shortcut. That’s the way it should be. It’s a great thing for advanced users, but I think of little benefit to the average.

For me, the simplicity of the clipboard is a good feature. Even if I had the extended capabilities of a clipboard that held multiple items, I probably would still use the basic functionality most often.

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Top 5 Attributes of Highly Effective Programmers

What attributes can contribute to a highly successful software developer versus the ordinary run-of-the-mill kind? I don’t believe the attributes listed here are the end-all, be-all list, nor do I believe you have to be born with them. Nearly all things in life can be learned, and these attributes are no exception.

Like this article? Check out my new book, Writing High-Performance .NET Code.

Humility

Humility is first because it implies all the other attributes, or at least enables them. There are a lot of misunderstandings of what humility is and sometimes it’s easier to explain it by describing what humility isn’t:

  • humility isn’t letting people walk all over you
  • humility isn’t suppressing your opinions
  • humility isn’t thinking you’re a crappy programmer

C.S. Lewis said it best, in the literary guise of a devil trying to subvert humanity:

Let him think of [humility] not as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character. . . Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be. . . By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools.*

Ok, so we realize humility isn’t pretending to be worse than you are and it’s not timidity. So what is it?

Simply put, humility is an understanding that the world doesn’t begin and end with you. It’s accepting that you don’t know everything there is to know about WPF, or Perl, or Linux. It’s an acknowledgment of the fact that, even if you’re an expert in some particular area, there is still much to learn. In fact, there is far more to learn than you could possibly do in a lifetime, and that’s ok.

Once you start assuming you’re the expert and final word on something, you’ve stopped growing, stopped learning, and stopped progressing. Pride can make you obsolete faster than you can say “Java”.

The fact is that even if you’re humble, you’re probably pretty smart. If you work in a small organization with few programmers (or any organization with few good programmers), chances are you’re more intelligent than the majority of them when it comes to computers. (If you are smarter than all of them about everything, then either you failed the humility test or you need to get out of that company fast). Since you happen to know more about computers and how software works than most people, and since everybody’s life increasingly revolves around using computers, this will give you the illusion that you are smarter than others about everything. This is usually a mistake.

Take Sales and Marketing for example. I have about 50 Dilbert strips hung in my office. I would guess half of them make fun of Sales or Marketing in some way. It’s easy, it’s fun, and it’s often richly deserved!

But if they didn’t sell your software, you wouldn’t get paid. You need them as much as they need you. If someone asked you to go sell your software, how would you do it? Do you even like talking to people? As clueless as they are about the realities of software development, they have skills you don’t.

There are some industries where extreme ego will get you places. I do not believe this to be the usual case in software, at least in companies run by people who understand software. Ego is not enough–results matter. If you have a big ego, you’d better be able to back it up. Unfortunately, the problem with egos is that they grow–eventually you won’t be able to keep up with it, and people will see through you.

The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague. – Dijkstra

Without humility, you will make mistakes. Actually, even with humility you’ll make mistakes, but you’ll realize it sooner. By assuming that you know how to solve a problem immediately, you may take steps to short-circuit the development process. You may think you understand the software so well that you can easily fix a bug with just a few tweaks…and yet, you didn’t realize that this other function over here is now broken. A humble programmer will first say “I don’t know the right way to solve this yet” and take the time to do the analysis.

Finally, humble people are a lot more pleasant to work with. They don’t make their superiority an issue. They don’t always have the “right answer” (meaning everybody else is wrong, of course). You can do pair programming with a humble person, you can do code reviews with a humble person, you can instruct a humble person.

Leave your ego out of programming.

It’s not at all important to get it right the first time. It’s vitally important to get it right the last time. – Andrew Hunt and David Thomas

Perhaps most importantly, a humble programmer can instruct him/herself…

Love of Learning

If you’re new to this whole programming thing, I hate to break it to you: school has just begun. Whatever you thought of your BS/MS in Computer Science you worked so hard at–it was just the beginning. It will get you your first job or two, but that’s it. If you can’t learn as you go, from now until you retire, you’re dead weight. Sure, you’ll be able to find a job working somewhere with your pet language for the rest of your life–COBOL and Fortran are still out there after all, but if you really want to progress you’re going to have to learn.

Learning is not compulsory. Neither is survival. – W. Edwards Deming

This means reading. A lot. If you don’t like reading, I suggest you start–get into Harry Potter, fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction, whatever. Something. Just read. Then get some technical books. Start with my list of essential developer books. They’re not as exciting as Harry Potter, but they’re not bad either.

A lot material is online, but for high quality, authoritative prose on fundamental subjects, a good book beats all.

Reading isn’t enough, though. You have to practice. You have to write your own test projects. You have to force yourself to push your boundaries. You can start by typing in code sample, but then you need to change them in ways unique to you. You should have personal projects and hobbies that expand your skills. Be writing your own tools, or “fun” programs. Write a game. Do what it takes to learn new things!

The type of programs you write have a big bearing on how well you learn new material. It has to be something that interests you, or you won’t keep it up. In my case, I’m developing software related to my LEGO hobby. In the past, I’ve written tools for word puzzles, system utilities, multimedia plug-ins, and more. They all started out of a need I had, or a desire to learn something new and useful to me personally.

Another aspect of this love of learning is related to debugging software. An effective developer is not satisfied with a problem until they understand how it works, why it happens, and the details of how to fix it. The details matter–understanding why a bug occurs is just as important as knowing what to do to fix it.

Learn from mistakes. I have seen programmers who make a mistake, have the correct solution pointed out to them, say, “huh, wonder why it didn’t work for me”, and go on their merry way, none-the-wiser. Once their code is working “the way it should” they’re done. They don’t care why or how–it works and that’s enough. It’s not enough! Understand the mistake,what fixed it, and why.

Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement. – Fred Brooks

Obviously, some balance has to be struck here. You cannot learn everything–it simply isn’t possible. Our profession is becoming increasingly specialized because there is simply too much out there. I also think that in some respects, you need to love learning just for the sake of learning.

Detail-orientedness

Developing software with today’s technologies is all about the details. Maybe in 100 years, software will progress to the point where it can write itself, be fully component-pluggable, self-documenting, self-testing, and then…there won’t be any programmers. But until that comes along (if ever), get used to paying attention to a lot of details.

To illustrate: pick a feature of any software product, and try to think of all the work that would have to be done to change it in some way. For anything non-trivial, you could probably come up with a list of a hundred discrete tasks: modifying the UI (which includes graphics, text, localization, events, customization, etc.), unit tests, algorithms, interaction with related components, and on and on, each discrete step being broken into sub-steps.

I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable. – Dwight Eisenhower

Here’s a problem, though: few humans can keep every single task in their head, especially over time. Thankfully, detail-orientedness does not necessarily mean being able to mentally track each and every detail. It means that you develop a mental pattern to deal with them. For example, the steps of changing a piece of software could be:

  1. Thoroughly understand what the code is doing and why
  2. Look for any and all dependencies and interactions with this code
  3. Have a well-thought-out mental picture of how it fits together.
  4. Examine the consequences of changing the feature.
  5. Update all related code that needs to (and repeat this cycle for those components)
  6. Update auxiliary pieces that might depend on this code (build system, installer, tests, documentation, etc.)
  7. Test and repeat.

An example: I find that as I’m working on a chunk of code, I realize there are several things I need to do after I’m finished with my immediate task. If I don’t do them, the software will break. If I try to remember all of them, one will surely slip by the wayside. I have a few choices here:

  1. Defer until later, while trying to remember them all
  2. Do them immediately
  3. Defer until later, after writing  them down

Each of these might be useful in different circumstances. Well…maybe not #1. I think that’s doomed to failure from the start and creates bad habits. If the secondary tasks  are short, easy, and well-understood, just do them immediately and get back to your primary task.

However, if you know they’ll require a lot of work, write them down. I prefer a sturdy engineering notebookin nearly all cases, but text files, Outlook tasks, notes, OneNote, bug tracking systems, and other methods can all work together to enable this.

The more experience you have, the easier you’ll be able to track the details you need to worry about. You’ll also analyze them quicker, but you will always need some way of keeping track of what you need to do next. There are simply too many details. Effective organization is a key ability of any good software engineer.

Another aspect of paying attention to details is critical thinking. Critical thinking implies a healthy skepticism about everything you do. It is particularly important as you examine the details of your implementation, designs, or plans. It’s the ability to pull out of those details what is important, what is correct, or on the other hand, what is garbage and should be thrown out. It also guides when you should use well-known methods of development, and when you need to come up with a novel solution to a hard problem.

Adaptability

“Enjoying success requires the ability to adapt. Only by being open to change will you have a true opportunity to get the most from your talent.” – Nolan Ryan

Change happens. Get used to it. This is a hard one for me, to tell the truth. I really, really like having a plan and following it, adapting it to my needs, not those of others.

The fact is, in software development, the project you end up writing will not be the one you started. This can be frustrating if you don’t know how to handle it.

To become adaptive first requires a change in mind set. This mind set says that change is inevitable, it’s ok, and you’re ready for it. How do you become ready for it? This is a whole other topic in itself, and I will probably devote a separate essay for it.

Other than the shift in mind set, start using techniques and technologies that enable easy change. Things like unit testing, code coverage, and refactoring all enable easier modification of code.

In war as in life, it is often necessary when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might. – Winston Churchill

For me, the first step in changing my mind set is to not get frustrated every time things change (“But you specifically said we were NOT going to implement the feature to work this way!”).

Passion

I think passion is up there with humility in importance. It’s so fundamental, that without it, the others don’t matter.

Anyone can dabble, but once you’ve made that commitment, your blood has that particular thing in it, and it’s very hard for people to stop you. – Bill Cosby

It’s also the hardest to develop. I’m not sure if it’s innate or not. In my own case, I think my passion developed at a very early age. It’s been there as long as I remember, even if I had periods of not doing much with it.

I’ve interviewed dozens of prospective developers at my current job, and this is the one thing I see consistently lacking. So many of them are in it just for another job. If that’s all you want, just a job to pay the bills, so be it. (Of course, I have to ask, if that’s the case, why are you reading this article?)

One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested. – E. M. Forster

There’s a world of difference between someone who just programs and someone who loves to program. Someone who just programs will probably not be familiar with the latest tools, practices, techniques, or technologies making their way down the pipeline. They won’t think about programming outside of business hours. On the weekends, they do their best to forget about computers. They have no personal projects, no favorite technologies, no blogs they like to read, and no drive to excel. They have a hard time learning new things and can be a large burden on an effective development team.

Ok, that’s maybe a bit of exaggeration, but by listing the counterpoints, it’s easier to see symptoms of someone who does have passion:

  • Thinks and breaths technology
  • Reads blogs about programming
  • Reads books about programming
  • Writes a blog about programming
  • Has personal projects
  • These personal projects are more important than the boring stuff at work
  • Keeps up with latest technologies for their interests
  • Pushes for implementation of the latest technologies (not blindly, of course)
  • Goes deep in technical problems.
  • Not content with merely coding to spec.
  • Needs an outlet of creativity, whether it be professional (software design) or personal (music, model building, LEGO building, art, etc.)
  • Thinks of the world in terms of Star Trek

Just kidding on the last one…

…(maybe)

That’s my list. It’s taken a few months to write this, and I hope it’s genuinely useful to someone, especially new, young software engineers just getting started. This is a hard industry, but it should also be fun. Learning these attributes, changing your mind set, and consciously deciding to become the engineer and programmer you want to be are the first steps. And also part of every step thereafter.

Nobody is born with any of these–they are developed, practiced, and honed to perfection over a lifetime. There is no better time to start than now.

* The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis

Word Count Plugin for Windows Live Writer

I’ve fixed one of the biggest holes in functionality in Windows Live Writer. It’s simple, but essential: the ability to count words (and characters and paragraphs) in  your posts before publishing.

Windows Live Writer doesn’t really offer a way to extend the menu system itself, but you can create an “Insert…” plugin that just analyzes content instead of creates it, so it works pretty well.

Go get it from Windows Live Gallery. Let me know what you think!

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Don’t delay your merging

Another one of those lessons learned posts. I know I’m supposed to merge changes across branches often to minimize the pain, but I didn’t do it.

Here’s the scenario: We’ve got 3 development branches: 6.3, 6.4, and 7.0 (the trunk). 6.3 and 6.4 are technically maintenance branches because we didn’t anticipate needing to them, but we are. Here’s where it gets funny. 6.4 is actually a branch off of 7.0 with some new features removed. 6.4 is the code base converted to handle unicode. 6.3 is the current development version, and it’s features need to be merged into 6.4 These two branches are rather divergent in places. It’s been months since the branches were synchronized. In addition to 20 conflicted files, the 13 localized resource DLLs can’t automatically be merged because their location changed. Yeesh…

So now I’m spending all day using DiffMerge to do these files. Not a fun day…

Lesson learned. Do frequent merges.

At least it’s Friday. Tomorrow, my wife and I are heading down to North Carolina to visit my grandmother before she heads to California for Christmas.

By the way, still no Internet at home. Comcast says it could be 28 days before the local construction company gets around to installing the new drop to our home. I’ve been getting a lot of piano practice and reading in.

The Effective Software Developer’s Book List

What books should all serious developers read and study? This is a list of books that I have either found particularly helpful in my own growth as a programmer, or that are popular on various required-reading lists. I have bolded books I consider absolute required reading (probably multiple times) for all software developers.

I’ve gathered these books from multiple sources, beginning with Steve McConnell’s list in the back of Code Complete.

By the way, just because a book is listed in the Introductory section does not mean you shouldn’t read it because you’re advanced.

Why the Have I Read? column? To keep me honest, and to serve as my own checklist.

(Updated 11/28 – PeopleWare)
(Updated 12/7 – Design of Everyday Things)
(Updated 1/26 – Beautiful Code, Essay section)
(Updated 6/3 – Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# with NUnit)

Introductory

Book

Have I Read?
Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction
Steve McConnell		 Y
Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas
James L. Adams		  
Programming Pearls (2nd Edition) (ACM Press)
Jon Bentley		 Y
Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering
Robert Glass		  
The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master
Andrew Hunt and David Thomas		 Y
Object-Oriented Design Heuristics
Arther Riel		 Y
UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language (3rd Edition) (The Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series)
Martin Fowler		  
Applying UML and Patterns: An Introduction to Object-Oriented Analysis and Design and Iterative Development (3rd Edition)
Craig Larman		  
Refactoring Workbook
William Wake		  
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition)
Frederick Brooks		 Y
Introduction to Algorithms
Thomas Cormen		  

Intermediate

Book Have I Read?
Software Configuration Management Patterns: Effective Teamwork, Practical Integration
Stephen Berczuk and Brad Appleton		  
Software Creativity 2.0
Robert Glass		  
Testing Computer Software, 2nd Edition
Cem Kaner, Jack Falk, Hung Q. Nguyen		  
Rapid Development
Steve McConnell		  
Software Requirements, Second Edition
Karl Wiegers		  
“Manager’s Handbook for Software Development” (PDF)
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center		  
Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture (The Addison-Wesley Signature Series)
Martin Fowler		  
Test Driven Development: By Example (The Addison-Wesley Signature Series)
Kent Beck		 Y
Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# with NUnit, 2nd Edition
Andy Hunt, Dave Thomas, Matt Hargett		 Y
Refactoring to Patterns (The Addison-Wesley Signature Series)
Joshua Kerievsky		  
Head First Design Patterns (Head First)
Elisabeth Freeman, Eric Freeman, Bert Bates, Kathy Sierra		  
User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development (The Addison-Wesley Signature Series)
Mike Cohn		  
Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C# (Robert C. Martin Series)
Robert Martin		  
Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns: With Examples in C# and .NET
Jimmy Nilsson		  
Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change (2nd Edition) (The XP Series)
Kent Beck		  
The Design of Everyday Things
Donald A. Norman		 Y
Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think  

Professional

Book Have I Read?
Software Architecture in Practice (2nd Edition) (The SEI Series in Software Engineering)
Len Bass, Paul Clements, and Rick Kazman		  
Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code (The Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series)
Martin Fowler		 Y
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series)
Eric Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides		 Y
Principles Of Software Engineering Management
Tom Gilb		  
Writing Solid Code
Steve Maguire		  
Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software
Eric Evans		  
Working Effectively with Legacy Code (Robert C. Martin Series)
Michael Feathers		  
Agile Estimating and Planning (Robert C. Martin Series)
Mike Cohn		  
Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit (The Agile Software Development Series)
Mary Poppendieck and Tom Poppendieck		  
Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash (The Addison-Wesley Signature Series)
Mary Poppendieck and Tom Poppendieck		  

Essays

Essay Have I Read?
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
Peter Norvig		 Y
They Write the Right Stuff
Charles Fishman		 Y
The Humble Programmer
Edsger Dikstra		 Y

Management

Book Have I Read?
Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams
Tom DeMarco		 Y

Windows

Book Have I Read?
Microsoft Windows Internals, Fourth Edition: Microsoft Windows Server(TM) 2003, Windows XP, and Windows 2000 (Pro-Developer)
Mark Russinovich and David Solomon		 Y
Programming Windows, Fifth Edition
Charles Petzold		 Y
Programming Applications for Microsoft Windows
Jeff Richter		 Y
Programming Windows With MFC
Jeff Prosise		 Y

.Net

Book Have I Read?
Inside C#, Second Edition
Tom Archer and Andrew Whitechapel		 Y
CLR via C#, Second Edition (Pro Developer)
Jeff Richter		 Y

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