Kategorie: Tim’s Weblog

Atul Varma – Beautifully Documented Code: „I wasn’t very pleased with the typography of the generated content—though obviously the aesthetics were customizable through CSS, none of the default stylesheets left me dying to read the documentation I created. I’ve always had these kinds of hangups when it comes to design; a lack of it repels…

Gojko Adzic – Lazy web sites run faster: „Clever choice of asynchronous processing is definitely one of the most important decisions in any enterprise system. This is especially true for Web sites, where it absolutely plays a key role. Here are a few ideas to think about when deciding how to split the work.“ Also…

PHP still serves us great, it’s very stable and usually painless to work with. But this week I’ve spent some quality time with PHP 5.3 (alpha4-dev) since our long-running PHP command line scripts were (still) leaking memory… So I reported my third memory leak in PHP today, bug #47038 (the older ones were bug #46889…

„Mapeed.AddressChooser is a Javascript script to create a nice address form for any websites that need to collect addresses. […] Interactive map display location while you are typing an address.“ (Via Ajaxian.)

Ryan Singer at Signal vs. Noise – iPhoto ’09 and Domain Language: „There is a strong tendency to use the same words that you see other software using. Be cautious about copying domain language, because copying language is copying a whole approach. Think through the domain yourself. What are people trying to do? What do…

Tim Bray – AD VII: Nine Programmer’s Notes: „At a deep level, debugging with print statements is superior to all other approaches. Which is good, because we seem to be stuck with it.“

Joel Spolsky – The new Fog Creek office: „Private offices with doors that close prevent programmers from interruptions allowing them to concentrate on code without being forced to stop and listen to every interesting conversation in the room. […] Long, straight desks include a motorized height-adjustable work surface for maximal ergonomics and comfort, and so…

Jeff Atwood – Hardware is Cheap, Programmers are Expensive: „Incidentally, this is also why failing to outfit your (relatively) highly paid programmers with decent equipment as per the Programmer’s Bill of Rights is such a colossal mistake. If a one-time investment of $4,000 on each programmer makes them merely 5% more productive, you’ll break even…

Scott Adams – Future of your Phone: „Imagine wondering how long the line is to an event, or what a particular forest fire looks like, for example. You send a query through your iPhone for anyone who is in that area, according to GPS tracking, and ask for a look. A kind stranger takes your…

Joel Spolsky – Another resume tip: „To a startup founder, middle managers just seem like added expense without more code getting written, and the only thing we REALLY need is code to be written, and customers to be called on the telephone.“