Arseni Mourzenko

• Taking screenshot of a QOpenGLWidget containing text Work­ing on a Qt ap­pli­ca­tion that uses OpenGL to draw lines and poly­gons, and cpp::QPainter to draw text, I was sur­prised to find that it is not par­tic­u­lar­ly straight­for­ward to make the ap­pli­ca­tion…
  c++ 1 qt 1 opengl 1 testing 8
• Stopping Python program from Supervisor I was quite puz­zled re­cent­ly by a fol­low­ing prob­lem. I need­ed to run a Python pro­gram that had an in­fi­nite loop: every N sec­onds, the script would per­form a task. In or­der to en­sure that the script…
  python 5 supervisor 1
• Edge cases Soft­ware prod­ucts are de­signed for the cas­es where things go right, the sit­u­a­tions, where net­works are per­fect­ly flaw­less, servers don't re­boot ran­dom­ly, and process­es hap­pen as they would hap­pen in…
  quality 36 management 34 interaction-design 9 user-experience 10
• Interviewing ChatGPT for a job Re­cent­ly, I was re­view­ing the in­ter­view ques­tions for a few com­pa­nies. Many of them were un­for­tu­nate­ly only about al­go­rithms—sad­ly in­deed, since those ques­tions were for the jobs that have noth­ing to…
  hiring 15 artificial-intelligence 1
• What targetting 100% code coverage taught me I was re­cent­ly in charge of draft­ing a new sys­tem for a cus­tomer. I took it as an op­por­tu­ni­ty to demon­strate some of the ap­proach­es that should lead to high­er qual­i­ty soft­ware, com­pared to what the…
  testing 8 unit-testing 6 quality 36
• Correlation tags For quite a long time, cor­re­la­tion IDs were used to map the log en­tries to a giv­en HTTP re­quest. The idea is sim­ple: every re­quest com­ing to a web ap­pli­ca­tion is be­ing as­signed a pseu­do-ran­dom piece…
  logging 1 tagging 4
• Reviewing code through dialogue Re­cent­ly, I tried a new tech­nique which mix­es pair pro­gram­ming and code re­view. I don't know if this tech­nique has a name, and I don't even know if it is used by some­body else—sure, I haven't seen it…
  communication 27 code-review 2
• This is what you get when you measure lines of code A few months ago, I wrote an ar­ti­cle about a tech­ni­cal leader who mis­un­der­stood how to mea­sure code qual­i­ty. Try­ing to im­prove things, his only achieve­ment was to make every­thing worse, be­cause of the…
  short 50 quality 36 javascript 3
• Side effects Re­cent­ly, I had a dis­cus­sion with a col­league about the no­tion of side ef­fects. I was talk­ing about the func­tion­al ap­proach­es to work with ar­rays, and list­ed three func­tions: map, fil­ter, and re­duce.…
  computer-science 1
• Designing documentation and technical emails A few years ago, I was work­ing on a pro­ject where a part was done by a team in Lon­don, and the oth­er part was de­vel­oped in France. To com­mu­ni­cate, we were us­ing among oth­ers the Web­Hooks, for the sole…
  visual-design 1 information-design 1 communication 27 quality 36
• Poor man’s temperature monitoring for data closets A few months ago, I ex­plained how I re­placed the fans in a serv­er pow­er sup­ply unit, in or­der to re­duce the noise made by the serv­er. Sim­i­lar­ly, in an­oth­er ar­ti­cle, I de­scribed how to si­lence an UPS.…
  hardware 11
• Non-blocking reading from stdin in Python One of my pro­jects re­lies heav­i­ly on mul­ti­pro­cess­ing. Some of its com­po­nents are chained through the Lin­ux pipes in or­der to process data. A com­mon way to read from stdin is to use…
  python 5
• Trimming strings Reg­u­lar­ly, I find in­ter­est­ing ques­tions on Stack Over­flow, that look ba­sic at the first sight, but ap­pear to be not that sim­ple af­ter all. To­day, it was a ques­tion on the Russ­ian ver­sion of Stack…
  refactoring 12 short 50 javascript 3
• Using LOCs to validate hypotheses In my pre­vi­ous ar­ti­cle, I was talk­ing about the tool which gath­ers the diffs from the ver­sion con­trol com­mits, and uses them to com­pute the num­ber of lines of code (LOC) per lan­guage over time, in…
  productivity 36 quality 36
• Languages usage over time I start­ed pro­gram­ming a long, long time ago. The old­est source code I can find in the archives is from 2004. Back then, I was sev­en­teen years old, us­ing Vi­su­al Ba­sic and some­thing that I be­lieved…
  productivity 36 quality 36
• When testing is not fun enough On reg­u­lar ba­sis, some col­league starts com­plain­ing in an in­for­mal dis­cus­sion about the low qual­i­ty of some pro­ject he's work­ing on. It has to do with code qual­i­ty, or lack of tests, or both. Every…
  testing 8 quality 36 rant 34 productivity 36
• How to deadlock a project In 2014, I wrote the ar­ti­cle Tak­ing hostages with Wa­ter­fall, ex­plain­ing how Ag­ile moves the pow­er of de­ci­sion about the scope and the cost of the pro­ject from the ones who make the soft­ware to the…
  blog-engine 2 management 34 quality 36
• Welcome to the new blog engine A few days ago, I re­leased the new ver­sion of the blog en­gine. Orig­i­nal de­vel­op­ment of the blog en­gine start­ed in the be­gin­ning of 2014. Back then, I was pub­lish­ing my ar­ti­cles in a form of a sta­t­ic…
  blog-engine 2
• Measuring quality like a pro My pre­vi­ous ar­ti­cle led some of the read­ers won­der­ing how a cor­rect ap­proach to mea­sur­ing stuff looks. I'll use this as an op­por­tu­ni­ty to show how I worked my­self as a con­sul­tant. The ar­ti­cle would…
  quality 36
• Measuring quality and undesired behavior When I talk about mea­sur­ing qual­i­ty, I can't em­pha­size more how mea­sur­ing a giv­en thing in­flu­ences the be­hav­ior of the per­sons who are be­ing mea­sured. When done prop­er­ly, this is an ex­cel­lent lever which en­cour­ages per­sons to work bet­ter. In oth­er…
  quality 36
• Tricky, tricky dates Any pro­gram­mer who worked with dates would tell that dates are a com­plex sub­ject. Time zones, UTC, day­light sav­ing time, leap years, and, my fa­vorite of all—leap sec­onds that “are not en­tire­ly…
  featured 8 testing 8 unit-testing 6 javascript 3
• Beyerdynamic T51p repair I own a Bey­er­dy­nam­ic T51p head­phones. I bought them in 2017, and a few months af­ter its war­ran­ty ex­pired, it start­ed to ex­pe­ri­ence a com­mon prob­lem for this mod­el: the right dri­ver would work only when the wire was put in a spe­cif­ic po­si­tion. A few…
  hardware 11 short 50
• Silencing PWS-741P-1R power supply I have a bunch of Su­per­Mi­cro 2U chas­sis 825TQ that I use for the tasks which don't re­quire a lot of CPU pow­er. The orig­i­nal chas­sis makes a lot of noise. When I say a lot, I mean it. You can't pos­si­bly stay in the room when this thing is on. I…
  hardware 11 short 50
• Hiring process is inherently wrong Reg­u­lar­ly, man­agers ask me ques­tions about the hir­ing process. All of them com­plain about three things: They have a lot of bad can­di­dates—can­di­dates who clear­ly don't qual­i­fy for the job. They have few good can­di­dates. They of­ten hire per­sons who end…
  hiring 15 rant 34
• Architecture without culture I was re­cent­ly watch­ing the Deep­Mind's Al­pha­Go doc­u­men­tary, which starts with sev­er­al views of Ox­ford, in­clud­ing a shot where half of the frame is filled with the out­side of The Shel­don­ian The­atre, the oth­er half show­ing the His­to­ry of Sci­ence…
  architecture (construction) 1 rant 34 short 50
• Setting inter-VLAN communication in Netgear ProSafe switches Re­cent­ly, I was try­ing to con­fig­ure VLANs in or­der to cre­ate more log­i­cal net­work view and in­crease the se­cu­ri­ty of the net­work by lim­it­ing the traf­fic from the dif­fer­ent types of ma­chines through the router ACLs. In or­der to do that, I had two…
  security 8 network 1
• Workflows, ETLs, and pure magic Five years ago, I wrote a rather opin­ion­at­ed and very crit­i­cal ar­ti­cle about Nin­tex Work­flows, a per­fect­ly use­less prod­uct which makes your life mis­er­able while you're pay­ing for it. Nin­tex is sold as a so­lu­tion to al­low non-tech­ni­cal per­sons to…
  quality 36 productivity 36 python 5
• How metrics impact the way we work A long time ago, I start­ed study­ing how qual­i­ty and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty can be mea­sured. I wrote ar­ti­cles about it, and I con­vinced a few dozen en­tre­pre­neurs about the im­por­tance of mea­sure­ment in their…
• Designing a contact form Re­cent­ly, a col­league asked me how I would re­design a con­tact form on a web­site. An e-com­merce site he was work­ing on had a “ba­sic” (as he claimed) form where you had to pro­vide: Your full name. Your…
  rant 34 interaction-design 9
• Minimum viable product An in­ter­est­ing ques­tion on SE.SE got my at­ten­tion re­cent­ly. The ques­tion is about things that may hap­pen to a pro­ject, in a con­text of a pro­ject which is tar­get­ed to be de­liv­ered eight months af­ter its start. A dis­cus­sion that fol­lowed showed that…
  management 34 agile 10 productivity 36 communication 27
• Build complexity I'm al­ways amazed at the ca­pac­i­ty of large and small com­pa­nies to pick the tools which would make their build as com­plex as pos­si­ble. It's like they en­joy pay­ing mon­ey for some­thing which will cost them even more mon­ey. The core prob­lem here is the…
  rant 34 productivity 36
• Fixing RTSP in a Vivotek camera I own a Viv­otek cam­era. It ap­pears that I haven't been to se­ri­ous up­dat­ing the firmware—but nei­ther is the man­u­fac­tur­er—since the cam­era was bought in 2015, but didn't have the lat­est firmware re­leased in... 2014. Al­though the de­scrip­tion of the…
  hardware 11
• YAGNI principle in action Dis­cussing YAG­NI with col­leagues, I of­ten find my­self in a sit­u­a­tion where they give me a con­crete ex­am­ple where they were very hap­py to think about a giv­en fea­ture or as­pect be­fore it was re­al­ly need­ed. As those dis­cus­sions al­ways fol­low the same…
  rant 34 productivity 36 quality 36 refactoring 12 agile 10
• Lazy programmer fallacy There is, among pro­ject man­agers, a think­ing that pro­gram­mers are lazy. Pro­gram­mers—they say—don't want to work; they pre­fer play­ing games or just do­ing noth­ing at all. This is all but truth. Ac­tu­al­ly, many pro­gram­mers en­joy pro­gram­ming. They have…
  rant 34 short 50 management 34 quality 36
• The essential skills of a developer, and why don't we check them during an interview A few months ago, I de­scribed a frac­ture which ex­ists be­tween the skills con­sid­ered de­sir­able dur­ing an in­ter­view and the skills which are ac­tu­al­ly valu­able for an em­ploy­ee. I haven't ex­plained, how­ev­er, the rea­sons for this frac­ture. This is the…
  hiring 15
• Documenting types used in services SOA and mi­croser­vices trends caused the fren­zy where every­one start­ed to ex­pose every­thing as a ser­vice. Large and small com­pa­nies want­ed to re­place big sys­tems of com­po­nents with rel­a­tive­ly un­clear in­ter­faces be­tween them by big­ger sys­tems of…
  rant 34 microservices 2 short 50
• Unit testing methods which are calling static methods Dis­claimer: the ar­ti­cle be­low talks about meth­ods call­ing pub­lic sta­t­ic meth­ods from oth­er class­es. This ex­cludes the calls to pri­vate sta­t­ic meth­ods. Re­cent­ly, I wrote a rather un­pop­u­lar an­swer on Stack Ex­change about sta­t­ic meth­ods in a con­text of…
  rant 34 refactoring 12 unit-testing 6 design 2
• Monochrome laziness Twelve years ago, Win­dows Vista was re­leased, im­press­ing every­one by its shiny, elab­o­rate icons. For in­stance, a re­cy­cle bin was il­lus­trat­ed by a shiny trans­par­ent waste bas­ket. Search func­tion­al­i­ty was shown in a form of a metal­lic mag­ni­fy­ing glass.…
  rant 34 design 2 interaction-design 9 user-experience 10 quality 36
• Take risks, fail fast In many soft­ware de­vel­op­ment teams, the source code is sa­cred. Its sa­cred­ness is caused by two fac­tors: The code is the ul­ti­mate ex­pres­sion of the in­tel­lec­tu­al work of the de­vel­op­ers. If you have any­thing against the code, it means that you're…
  productivity 36 quality 36 refactoring 12 rant 34 requirements 3
• Aligning plain text with spaces and tabs A fel­low de­vel­op­er asked me how to solve the fol­low­ing prob­lem. An ap­pli­ca­tion is dis­play­ing some data in a form of a grid. The user should be able to copy this data to a text field in a third-par­ty ap­pli­ca­tion. The text field has no sup­port for any…
  prototyping 1
• Silencing a 2U UPS I have a home of­fice with a bunch of servers and net­work hard­ware. In or­der to pro­tect my­self against oc­ca­sion­al prob­lems with the pow­er grid, I had two Eaton UPS units, but a firmware up­grade bricked both of them, so I had to buy an­oth­er one. I…
  hardware 11 short 50
• Quiet fans with high static pressure for 2U servers Re­cent­ly, I pur­chased a bunch of 2U chas­sis for a SAN. Since the servers are in my home of­fice, they should be qui­et. This wasn't a prob­lem when I used 4U servers, but with 2U size fac­tor, and es­pe­cial­ly in the con­text where the front pan­el is all…
  hardware 11
• RabbitMQ clustering I'm work­ing on an ap­pli­ca­tion which would rely ex­ten­sive­ly on Rab­bit­MQ for two things: trans­mit­ting mes­sages from sen­sors to the end user, and trans­mit­ting the or­ders from the end user to the ac­tu­a­tors (such as lamp switch­es). For the first cat­e­go­ry…
  rabbitmq 1 mqs 1 clustering 1 high-availability 1
• Identifiers in bug tracking systems One an­noy­ing as­pect of bug track­ing sys­tems is the iden­ti­fiers. In sys­tems such as Jira, every time a tick­et is cre­at­ed, an iden­ti­fi­er is as­signed to it. The iden­ti­fi­er is based on a num­ber which in­cre­ments every time. For ex­am­ple, I cre­ate two…
  interaction-design 9 user-experience 10 short 50
• On bug tracking systems There are no good bug track­ing sys­tems, and I'm about to ex­plain what makes them not good and why good sys­tems weren't de­vel­oped yet. To be­gin, let's il­lus­trate a jour­ney of two per­sons work­ing on the same team: one of the pro­gram­mers and a prod­uct…
  rant 34 productivity 36 user-experience 10 productivity 36 management 34
• What makes performance decrease over time? In an ex­cel­lent blog post, Niki­ta Prokopov shares his thoughts about “our in­dus­try’s lack of care for ef­fi­cien­cy, sim­plic­i­ty, and ex­cel­lence,” ex­plain­ing, among oth­ers, that year af­ter year, hard­ware be­comes more and more pow­er­ful, but ap­pli­ca­tions…
  performance 13 quality 36 profiling 4
• The essential skills of a developer I was re­cent­ly ap­proached by a man­ag­er work­ing in a large (more than a thou­sand em­ploy­ees) com­pa­ny. Aside his man­age­ment job, he was also ac­tive­ly con­tribut­ing to the hir­ing in­ter­views. He have read the se­ries of ar­ti­cles I wrote on the sub­ject back…
  hiring 15
• Why do you need a productivity consultant Many of the per­sons who learn about my pre­vi­ous ac­tiv­i­ty as a pro­duc­tiv­i­ty con­sul­tant are won­der­ing what sort of prob­lems I was solv­ing, and why would a giv­en com­pa­ny be need­ing a con­sul­tant in­stead of solv­ing those prob­lems on their own. This…
  productivity 36 workplace 7
• Streaming large uploads to a backend API When it comes to up­load­ing large files to a Flask ap­pli­ca­tion, the sub­ject seems to be well doc­u­ment­ed. Flask (or rather Werkzeug) has lots of fea­tures to stream not only down­loads, but also up­loads them­selves, in or­der to re­ceive huge files with…
  flask 2 werkzeug 1 performance 13 python 5
• Kevin D. Mitnick's The art of deception Just fin­ished read­ing Kevin D. Mit­nick's The art of de­cep­tion. The first part of the book con­tains the sto­ries of so­cial en­gi­neers in ac­tion. The sec­ond part is a set of rec­om­men­da­tions. The sto­ries are fun to read; the rec­om­men­da­tions are some­times…
  short 50 security 8
• Make your build agents short living While dis­cussing with a friend of mine what I de­scribed in my pre­vi­ous ar­ti­cle, it ap­peared that my ap­proach to launch­ing tests from a build pipeline is not nec­es­sar­i­ly well known. It seems that I can share some in­sight on that sub­ject. A manda­to­ry…
  performance 13 continuous-deployment 1
• Gated checkins are evil I was re­cent­ly talk­ing with a de­vel­op­er about a pre-build strat­e­gy he wants to set up in his team which uses trunk-based de­vel­op­ment. His idea is that in or­der to pre­vent prob­lem­at­ic code from hit­ting the trunk in ver­sion con­trol, a client-side…
  productivity 36 testing 8 rant 34
• Candy security The ti­tle of this ar­ti­cle is a term I dis­cov­ered through the book of Kevin D. Mit­nick, The art of de­cep­tion, page 79. It means that the com­pa­ny has strong se­cu­ri­ty perime­ter with the out­side world, but once you got through, noth­ing can stop you. In…
  security 8 short 50
• Don't ask writing quality code Four years ago, I com­plained about peo­ple who are ask­ing to write good code in a con­text where the com­pa­ny cul­ture it­self leads to bad code in the first place. I ex­plained the ne­ces­si­ty of RCA, and the use­less­ness of in­di­vid­ual sug­ges­tions to write…
  quality 36 workplace 7
• “T-shaped” people model misuse In Hand­book for new em­ploy­ees (PDF, 4 MB), Valve in­tro­duced on page 47 a con­cept of “T-shaped” peo­ple. What it means that peo­ple who want to work at Valve are ex­pect­ed to be both gen­er­al­ists—“high­ly skilled at a broad set of valu­able things” and…
  management 34 short 50 thoughts 6
• DRM, custom hardware and technical solutions to human problems A now closed ques­tion on Soft­wa­reEngi­neer­ing.SE asked about a way to pre­vent the users from get­ting screen­shots of an ap­pli­ca­tion. The con­text is an ap­pli­ca­tion show­ing sen­si­tive doc­u­ments in a bank. While the doc­u­ment is en­crypt­ed, it re­mains safe.…
  short 50 security 8
• Bulky, heavy, fat ORMs A long time ago, I wrote the fol­low­ing in the de­scrip­tion of Or­seis. I nev­er liked ORMs. They are bulky, heavy, fat. They build SQL queries be­hind my back, and I don't like it. I want to be in con­trol. Re­cent­ly, a per­son asked on SE.SE how is it…
  productivity 36
• Reinventing authentication I'm de­light­ed by the sim­plic­i­ty of OAuth 2.0 (as far as its in­te­gra­tion into Flask and ex­press takes takes less than five min­utes) and the fact that it makes pass­word man­age­ment some­one else's prob­lem.¹ Re­al­ly, I'm so de­light­ed that I now use it in…
  security 8 user-experience 10
• Ratings in a CV Heard to­day a dis­cus­sion of two col­leagues about a pos­si­ble im­prove­ment of a CV by adding for every tech­nol­o­gy a rat­ing, show­ing the mas­tery lev­el of the per­son in this par­tic­u­lar tech­nol­o­gy. I'm sor­ry about those col­leagues. They have a deep…
  rant 34 hiring 15 communication 27
• Naming conventions for servers, two years later A few years ago, I wrote an ar­ti­cle ex­plain­ing how do I name servers. Since then, lit­tle changed, and con­ven­tions used in com­pa­nies are still in­sane. Men­tal­i­ty hasn't changed ei­ther, and it's still con­sid­ered pro­fes­sion­al to have ar­bi­trary,…
  rant 34 datacenter 4
• Users matter more than bytes and CPU cycles There is some­thing com­plete­ly wrong in de­vel­op­ers' na­ture to be ob­sessed with per­for­mance to the detri­ment of every­thing else. It seems even that this com­pul­sive ob­ses­sion is not some­thing we ac­quire with prac­tice, since it af­fects even be­gin­ner…
  interaction-design 9 short 50 rant 34 performance 13 optimization 2
• Blogging and plagiarism A few days ago, I was con­tact­ed by a CS stu­dent who want­ed my ad­vice on his on­line pres­ence. He had an in­ter­est­ing CV, a de­cent web­site, and a blog which had reg­u­lar ar­ti­cles—much more reg­u­lar than mine. I en­joy a lot work­ing with stu­dents who did…
  short 50 communication 27
• Hidden costs of freeware libraries There are so many open source li­braries and frame­works out there for de­vel­op­ers to down­load and use that it is very tempt­ing to use them uni­ver­sal­ly, with­out ask­ing one­self if a giv­en li­brary or a frame­work is re­al­ly nec­es­sary for the pro­ject. With…
  productivity 36
• Those things we measure A re­cent change in Book­shelf ser­vice re­moved the counter which in­di­cat­ed how many books were dis­played on the page. To be more pre­cise, the counter can only be vis­i­ble by the user in per­son, but not pub­licly. This is es­sen­tial­ly a shift to sub­stance…
  quality 36
• Introducing... a pen In most pro­jects, soon­er or lat­er, some­one asks him­self which tool should be used to make di­a­grams. It may be that the team wants to doc­u­ment their ar­chi­tec­ture, or ex­plain some­thing to a cus­tomer, or... what­ev­er. Long sto­ry short, one needs to do a…
  communication 27 productivity 36
• Working with the people you manage A few years ago, I worked in a com­pa­ny in Poitiers. Things went well un­til our boss left, and a new one ar­rived. The new one ap­peared to be, well, a bit proud of his new sta­tus, and, nat­u­ral­ly, de­cid­ed that he has plen­ty of im­por­tant things to do and…
  communication 27 management 34 rant 34
• Interfaces in microservices Ob­serv­ing large in-house sys­tems which ei­ther use SOA ap­proach­es or even at­tempt to mim­ic mi­croser­vices, I con­stant­ly no­tice a pat­tern which makes those sys­tems sub-op­ti­mal and dif­fi­cult to main­tain. A tiny Hel­lo World-style ap­pli­ca­tion can eas­i­ly…
  productivity 36 quality 36 microservices 2
• Beautiful identifiers In the vast area of mis­treat­ed de­sign el­e­ments, there is one which is im­ple­ment­ed con­sis­tent­ly wrong: the iden­ti­fiers. In IT, iden­ti­fiers are every­where. Make a pur­chase on Ama­zon, and your or­der gets an iden­ti­fi­er. Once the pack­age is shipped, the…
  user-experience 10
• Utility classes are wrong Every­one has some­where on a PC a di­rec­to­ry called “mis­cel­la­neous”, or sim­ply “misc.” This is where we put or­phaned stuff which haven't found its place some­where else, grouped with sim­i­lar files in a well-named di­rec­to­ry. For some peo­ple, the desk­top…
  rant 34 terminology 2
• Desperate designs: Microsoft Bob legacy Since I'm mov­ing to a dif­fer­ent city, I had to find a mov­ing com­pa­ny for my fur­ni­ture and the servers. Here in France, the user ex­pe­ri­ence when deal­ing with those com­pa­nies ranges from poor to “WTF hap­pened in the head of the guys who did this…
  interaction-design 9
• The greatness of TDD illustrated Dur­ing an in­ter­view, I was asked to solve the fol­low­ing prob­lem: A val­i­da­tion func­tion takes as in­put a string con­tain­ing paren­the­sis and square brack­ets. It should re­turn true if the clos­ing paren­the­sis and brack­ets are match­ing the open­ing ones, or…
  featured 8 refactoring 12 unit-testing 6
• Duplicating database constraints in code When I re­view data­base mod­els for RDBMS, I'm usu­al­ly sur­prised to find lit­tle to no con­straints. For in­stance, per­cent­age is of­ten stored in a col­umn of type int (while tinyint would be more ap­pro­pri­ate) and there is no CHECK con­straint to re­strict…
  database 2
• Estimation vs. commitment I love es­ti­mat­ing soft­ware pro­jects. Oh, who am I kid­ding?! Most IT pro­fes­sion­als hate be­ing asked how long the task will take. They hate it for a good rea­son: they find it worth­less, and they know their es­ti­mates are usu­al­ly wrong any­way. As such IT…
  management 34 communication 27
• XY-problem and project estimates A year ago, I was work­ing as an ar­chi­tect and IT con­sul­tant with a com­pa­ny on a large soft­ware pro­ject. The pro­ject was es­ti­mat­ed by their in-house lead de­vel­op­er, and I was asked to re­view the es­ti­mate to check if it's cor­rect. The only prob­lem was…
  communication 27 thoughts 6 short 50
• What this blog is not for This blog is a good place for rants and de­tailed analy­sis of spe­cif­ic sub­jects (but most­ly for rants), I al­ways found it a bad place for short tex­tu­al con­tent or con­tent con­sist­ing most­ly or ex­clu­sive­ly of me­dia. For in­stance, if I want to rec­om­mend…
  short 50
• A bug or a change? A fea­ture is de­liv­ered to a cus­tomer. The cus­tomer com­plains that some­thing doesn't be­have as ex­pect­ed and cre­ates a tick­et in a bug track­ing sys­tem. Should we clas­si­fy this tick­et as a bug or a change? The ques­tion mat­ters for many soft­ware…
  rant 34 communication 27 agile 10
• Expensive projects are really cool Fol­low­ing my pre­vi­ous ar­ti­cle, a col­league told me a sim­i­lar but much more im­pres­sive sto­ry which hap­pened to him. Since he doesn't en­joy writ­ing too much, he in­vit­ed me to tell the sto­ry here. Six years ago, Nico­las was hired as a free­lance…
  communication 27 featured 8 management 34 short 50
• Questioning the goal of the project Re­cent­ly, a friend of mine ap­proached me with a rewrite of a soft­ware prod­uct. A small com­pa­ny where she works has a small piece of desk­top soft­ware writ­ten ten years ago in WinDe­v¹ by an in-house de­vel­op­er left five years ago. The pur­pose of this…
  requirements 3 agile 10 communication 27 short 50
• Execution plan caching for stored procedures and parametrized queries Read­ing dif­fer­ent ex­pla­na­tions about ex­e­cu­tion plan caching by Mi­crosoft SQL Serv­er, I found very con­fus­ing the dis­cus­sion about the ben­e­fits of us­ing stored pro­ce­dures in­stead of pa­ram­e­trized queries. While [some re­li­able sources][1] men­tion no…
  performance 13
• Official version control, competing systems and free market The way ver­sion con­trol ser­vice is or­ga­nized with­in many cor­po­ra­tions is that there is an op­er­a­tions de­part­ment which is in charge of the of­fi­cial sys­tem, and, de­pend­ing on the com­pa­ny, de­vel­op­ers are ei­ther forced to use this sys­tem, or are sim­ply…
  thoughts 6 management 34
• Person-centered metrics and self-organizing teams We can­not re­li­ably mea­sure de­vel­op­ers' pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, and this is the ma­jor el­e­ments which push­es many man­agers to fo­cus on less rep­re­sen­ta­tive as­pects of de­vel­op­ers' con­tri­bu­tion to a pro­ject and a com­pa­ny. Some com­pa­nies do a re­al­ly bad job,…
  management 34 quality 36 productivity 36
• Telecommuting and procrastination My col­leagues and I had re­cent­ly an in­ter­est­ing dis­cus­sion about let­ting de­vel­op­ers to work at home. They high­light­ed that one of the is­sues of telecom­mut­ing is that it makes it dif­fi­cult for the…
  productivity 36 management 34 quality 36
• Narrative requirements I was re­cent­ly dis­cussing with a group of fel­low de­vel­op­ers the qual­i­fy of doc­u­ments which are usu­al­ly done to list the prod­uct re­quire­ments. Af­ter com­plain­ing about the low qual­i­ty of most doc­u­ments I've seen (and this com­plaint was shared by the…
• The harm of emotional response I can't stop notic­ing how emo­tion­al pro­ject man­agers can be, and how much harm could emo­tions cause to their pro­ject. A week ago, I had my­self an in­ter­est­ing case when my emo­tion­al re­sponse dur­ing a call with a cus­tomer led to a neg­a­tive con­duct on…
  short 50 communication 27
• Do we think enough about coding standards we use? What is wrong about cod­ing stan­dards and “best prac­tices” in gen­er­al is that they throw the think­ing process away. This may be a good idea for man­u­al work­ers, but is quite prob­lem­at­ic for de­vel­op­ers.…
  quality 36 code-style 3
• Visual management and the everlasting tasks Near­ly a year ago, I de­scribed how I im­ple­ment­ed vi­su­al man­age­ment in my com­pa­ny. My us­age of vi­su­al man­age­ment re­mained rough­ly the same, but over time, I dis­cov­ered one as­pect I wasn't think­ing of when I wrote the orig­i­nal ar­ti­cle: the tasks which…
  short 50 management 34 agile 10 workspace 1 communication 27
• Corporate environment: the death of creative thinking The na­ture of cor­po­rate en­vi­ron­ment sti­fles cre­ativ­i­ty and makes the most in­ter­est­ing pro­jects im­pos­si­ble to do. Let me ex­plain it through an ex­am­ple. A few months ago, as a pro­ject man­ag­er in a…
  productivity 36
• Packages, dependencies and interaction between teams Re­cent­ly, a ques­tion of Pro­gram­mers.SE passed un­no­ticed, be­cause of its length. This is un­for­tu­nate, be­cause the ques­tion high­lights a bunch of mis­un­der­stand­ings with­in many teams on a broad range of sub­jects, from Con­tin­u­ous In­te­gra­tion to…
  rant 34 productivity 36 management 34 communication 27
• Measurement: a two-edged sword Too of­ten, the prac­tice of mea­sur­ing things is used in place of ba­sic think­ing, and, log­i­cal­ly, leads to low cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion and poor prod­uct qual­i­ty. The ma­jor rea­son for that is that in most cas­es, mea­sure­ment is de­hu­man­iz­ing. A cus­tomer,…
  short 50 performance 13 quality 36 rant 34
• Linters and style checkers: how to save hours of painful debugging I'm al­ways im­pressed with the con­sis­ten­cy of screw-ups caused by the un­will­ing­ness of pro­gram­mers to fol­low ba­sic guide­lines. To be more spe­cif­ic, I'm talk­ing about my own screw-ups here. I've been con­vinced a long time ago that: Style check­ers and…
  productivity 36 short 50 quality 36
• Should students be using syntax highlighting? A few months ago, some­one asked a ques­tion on Stack­Ex­change, won­der­ing if there is a re­search pa­per in­di­cat­ing whether syn­tax high­light­ing helps or slows down the learn­ing process of fu­ture pro­gram­mers. The ques­tion was closed and delet­ed, so here…
  short 50 quality 36
• Tampering SharePoint assemblies part 2 In the pre­vi­ous ar­ti­cle, I ex­plained the con­text of a lega­cy Share­Point code which should be test­ed. For in­stance, re­gres­sion test­ing should cov­er meth­ods such as: pub­lic string Do­Some­thing(int what­ev­er) { var urls =…
  testing 8
• Tampering SharePoint assemblies part 1 I've in­her­it­ed a Share­Point pro­ject and I'm at the step when I start adding tests for re­gres­sion test­ing. If the au­thors of the code knew any­thing about ob­ject ori­en­ta­tion and de­sign, there would be no prob­lems at this step; but, as usu­al, they were…
  testing 8
• Control Hu­man be­ings want to con­trol every­thing. Their lives, oth­er peo­ple, things around them, events which can af­fect them in any way. The il­lu­sion of con­trol gives them cer­tain­ty, the feel­ing of or­der, the…
  thoughts 6 short 50 management 34 agile 10
• Topography of tests Im­por­tant note: this ar­ti­cle is writ­ten for de­vel­op­ers who don't prac­tice TDD, that is more than 99% of de­vel­op­ers I know. TDD is a very dif­fer­ent world, and a few as­ser­tions I make in this ar­ti­cle don't ap­ply there. For in­stance, my skep­ti­cism…
  testing 8 productivity 36 quality 36 featured 8
• Workflows Im­por­tant note: this ar­ti­cle fo­cus­es specif­i­cal­ly on Share­Point work­flows. What is writ­ten here doesn't ap­ply to Win­dows Work­flow Foun­da­tion (WF) and sim­i­lar work­flow tools, which have a per­fect­ly valid us­age and em­pow­er de­vel­op­ers with the abil­i­ty…
  rant 34 productivity 36
• Cloud computing: a rather expensive alternative I was al­ways con­vinced that buy­ing own servers is the most stu­pid thing a com­pa­ny can do at the era of cloud com­put­ing. If I deal with servers, it is ex­clu­sive­ly be­cause: I love deal­ing with servers. This alone is enough. There are a lot of things to…
  hardware 11 datacenter 4 short 50
• Servers monitoring UI proposal In the young in­dus­try which is soft­ware de­vel­op­ment, most do­mains are filled with ap­pli­ca­tions made by de­vel­op­ers with no thoughts about the end users. Bul­letin boards, for in­stance, were an ex­cel­lent ex­am­ple of ter­ri­ble, un­ac­cept­able user…
  user-experience 10 interaction-design 9 productivity 36
• Micro-services in a context of high complexity and low code quality One of the most prob­lem­at­ic things of a soft­ware de­vel­op­er is how to han­dle the in­creas­ing com­plex­i­ty of a giv­en code base and the de­creas­ing qual­i­ty of it. Code which, when orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten, was read­able and un­der­stand­able, looks com­plete­ly scary…
  short 50 productivity 36 quality 36 refactoring 12
• Why do I need to install SQL Server for a simple Hello World ASP.NET MVC website? I need­ed to cre­ate a small serv­er-side web-based ap­pli­ca­tion. The ap­pli­ca­tion is ex­treme­ly sim­ple, just a few lines of code. Host­ing provider seems to sup­port only PHP and ASP.NET/ASP.NET MVC, and I picked the last one, since the ap­pli­ca­tion may…
  short 50 rant 34 user-experience 10
• Bad, bad passwords Pass­words are an aber­ra­tion. In a ide­al world, we wouldn't have pass­words, but only keys. The con­cept of a pass­word as a se­cu­ri­ty mea­sure is flawed, and leads to mul­ti­ple is­sues. Among oth­ers: When the pass­word is sent by the client to the serv­er,…
  security 8 user-experience 10
• Naming conventions for servers The rant se­ries of this blog will be in­com­plete if I wouldn't men­tion the nam­ing con­ven­tions for servers, es­pe­cial­ly since I've nev­er even seen a con­ven­tion which would make at least some sense in any com­pa­ny. The three pre­vail­ing nam­ing con­ven­tions…
  rant 34 datacenter 4
• The complexity of API keys When it comes to han­dling API keys, there are clas­si­cal­ly two sit­u­a­tions which are a bit prob­lem­at­ic: pub­lic shar­ing of a key and man in the mid­dle. Look­ing at the ap­proach­es by Ama­zon, Google and oth­er big com­pa­nies, I find it both over­ly com­plex…
  security 8
• Streaming input and output in Flask I al­ways found Flask painful to use when it comes to stream­ing bi­na­ry data, such as when I need to send a bi­na­ry file or re­ceive one. The of­fi­cial doc­u­men­ta­tion is very sparse, ex­plain­ing how to re­ceive files sub­mit­ted through a form, how to send a…
  short 50 flask 2 python 5 performance 13
• Organizing information: from rigid structures to the lack of information organization When or­ga­niz­ing in­for­ma­tion such as files, two prob­lems arise every time: the un­cer­tain­ty that the cur­rent struc­ture is ap­pro­pri­ate, and the cas­es which are out­side the struc­ture. Those two prob­lems…
  tagging 4 data-structures 2
• Simplifying systems by adding proper abstractions The orig­i­nal draft of Solange pro­ject de­fined a no­tion of pro­file and in­stance. Ac­cord­ing to the to­day's doc­u­men­ta­tion (re­vi­sion 1234): A pro­file is a gener­ic de­scrip­tion of a ma­chine, i.e. a set of con­fig­u­ra­tion items and op­er­a­tions which de­fine a…
  devops 2 short 50 refactoring 12
• Early and “where to start” questions I al­ready dis­cussed how Stack Over­flow en­cour­ages lazi­ness and how most per­for­mance ques­tions are wrong. The more I fo­cus on the ques­tions asked by my peers, the more I no­tice how in­com­plete, raw and…
  communication 27
• Teaching patterns Col­lege de­grees in IT-re­lat­ed dis­ci­plines are known for not teach­ing some cru­cial things that every de­vel­op­er should know. Many stu­dents may be proud of con­tribut­ing to dozens of pro­jects, but don't…
  productivity 36 rant 34 thoughts 6
• Scripting languages, automation and productivity I re­mem­ber Prag­mat­ic Pro­gram­mer book en­cour­ag­ing to use plain text, and what could be more pow­er­ful than Lin­ux shell and a script­ing lan­guage to work with text in or­der to trans­form it? That's why…
  productivity 36
• Comparing Java with C# I start­ed pro­gram­ming in Java a few days ago and im­me­di­ate­ly felt in love with Java. As a per­son who have used C# for sev­en years, I was afraid that I wouldn't ap­pre­ci­ate Java, would find that a lot of C# fea­tures are miss­ing in Java, and that in…
  java 2 short 50
• Unit tests, stubs and non-deterministic behavior When it comes to unit test­ing, be­gin­ner pro­gram­mers are of­ten blocked when reach­ing code which feels non-de­ter­min­is­tic or when the re­sult changes over time. Two clas­si­cal ex­am­ples are code which…
  java 2 unit-testing 6
• Most performance questions are wrong I don't re­mem­ber any ques­tion post­ed on Soft­wa­reEngi­neer­ing.SE re­lat­ed to per­for­mance which would be a good, on-top­ic ques­tion. I re­mem­ber ques­tions which were com­plete­ly wrong or sim­ply unan­swer­able.…
  performance 13 stack-exchange 4 profiling 4
• Measurements as a precursor of culture of quality When au­dit­ing dif­fer­ent IT com­pa­nies, the no­tice­able pat­tern is that com­pa­nies which per­form bad­ly have prob­lems in every imag­in­able area. I've nev­er seen a com­pa­ny which has out­stand­ing work qual­i­ty…
  productivity 36 management 34 quality 36 workplace 7
• A few words about Solange project For near­ly nine months, I am work­ing on a pro­ject called Solange which con­sists of De­vOps plat­form which makes it pain­less to de­ploy new pro­jects in pro­duc­tion. Sur­pris­ing­ly, I haven't writ­ten too much about it, not be­cause it's a se­cret (the source…
  devops 2 short 50
• Stack Overflow make us lazy It is com­mon to think that the pur­pose of Stack Over­flow is to make the world bet­ter, and it does, some­how. I think that it in­creased the over­all qual­i­ty of de­vel­op­er-ori­ent­ed re­sources, pro­vid­ed a…
  rant 34 stack-exchange 4 short 50
• The documentation is the spec A prob­lem en­coun­tered by most de­vel­op­ers and teams is that any pro­ject re­quires to per­form a lot of tasks in par­al­lel. Writ­ing code im­plies do­ing a bit of de­sign, refac­tor­ing should be done at the same time, but there is also test­ing, and…
  short 50 productivity 36
• Freedom of choice Scott Adams re­cent­ly wrote an ar­ti­cle called [Would You Take Or­ders From Ma­chines?][1]. Al­though the idea is in­ter­est­ing, my hum­ble opin­ion is that Scott is miss­ing the point. The first prob­lem with his ar­ti­cle is the use of the term “or­ders”. We…
  thoughts 6
• Does it look like an XSLT-based website to you? The ar­ti­cle talks about the [source web­site][1], the web­site which hosts the source code of pub­lic pro­jects. Five years ago, I was chal­lenged with a prob­lem re­lat­ed to source code. I had to make it some­how ac­ces­si­ble from any­where, pri­ma­ry to make…
  interaction-design 9 short 50
• Did you know that Ruby is faster than C? In the past few days, there was on Pro­gram­mers.SE at least three ques­tions ([ex­am­ple][1]) which can be sum­ma­rized as: “Which pro­gram­ming lan­guage is faster, this one or that one?” This is an­noy­ing. I al­ready as­sert­ed once that it makes no sense to…
  productivity 36 rant 34 performance 13
• Google Search is great, or why should your internal documentation be public Re­cent­ly, I an­swered a ques­tion on Pro­gram­mers.SE about doc­u­men­ta­tion tools such as Con­flu­ence for the in­ter­nal doc­u­men­ta­tion of the pro­ject. My an­swer was bad­ly writ­ten and I had no enough time or in­ter­est to rewrite it cor­rect­ly, so I re­moved it.…
  featured 8 communication 27 productivity 36
• And what if most projects were research projects? When I start­ed to work on the lat­est pro­ject re­quir­ing skills in Lin­ux, Python and Node.js, that is three do­mains I nev­er used be­fore, I was very clear with my­self: the pro­ject will take what it will take, maybe two months, maybe six, maybe three…
  management 34 communication 27
• Written in stone On most pro­jects, a huge amount of time is spent hy­poth­e­siz­ing about sub­jects which not only don't mat­ter, but of­ten don't have a de­fin­i­tive an­swer. I of­ten see pro­gram­mers ar­gu­ing about which one of two im­ple­men­ta­tions is faster and which one will…
  short 50 rant 34 performance 13
• Aren't we misusing YAGNI too often? OK, I get it, I'm over-think­ing and over-en­gi­neer­ing this app. I should KISS, be­cause YAG­NI. Great. I should not at­tempt to solve prob­lems I don't have. I should not at­tempt to solve prob­lems I don't have. Or should I? De­vel­op­ment is filled with…
  refactoring 12 rant 34 short 50
• What if the team would just circumvent the “productivity measures”? Work­ing with teams and com­pa­nies which ex­pe­ri­ence prob­lems, I can't no­tice a strong cor­re­la­tion be­tween the way man­age­ment treats em­ploy­ees and those em­ploy­ees treat pro­jects they are work­ing on. It al­ways amazes me how many CEOs are ex­pect­ing their…
  productivity 36 management 34 communication 27
• Image formats and why do they matter See also [How does Ya­hoo's Smush.It work and why doesn't every­one use it?][8], from which this ar­ti­cle is in­spired from. One ques­tion any web de­vel­op­er asks him­self soon­er or lat­er is which for­mat is the best for­mat for im­ages. The broad sup­port of…
  performance 13
• Terminology: developer vs. programmer vs. coder De­vel­op­er, pro­gram­mer and coder are terms which are quite com­pli­cat­ed to de­fine. More­over, many per­sons just use them in­ter­change­ably, mak­ing things worse. Fi­nal­ly, de­f­i­n­i­tions from Wikipedia and oth­er sources don't em­pha­size enough the dif­fer­ence…
  terminology 2
• Interview questions I'm of­ten sur­prised by the low qual­i­ty of an­swers I get from the can­di­dates dur­ing in­ter­views. Tech­ni­cal ques­tions quick­ly show a deep mis­un­der­stand­ing of the ba­sic con­cepts, and I'm won­der­ing how could it be that a per­son who claims be­ing a…
  hiring 15 short 50
• Elaboration through sharing The risk of work­ing alone is that one may start to have a sim­pli­fied vi­sion of a prob­lem, and not be­ing able to see be­yond this sim­ple mod­el. This hap­pens to me a lot; to­day, I have an ex­cel­lent il­lus­tra­tion of the prob­lem. Every­thing start­ed with…
  stack-exchange 4 communication 27 short 50
• Visual management I dis­cov­ered [Vi­su­al man­age­ment blog][1] in 2013. Al­though I al­ready heard about Kent Beck's Big Vis­i­ble Chart, I've nev­er ac­tu­al­ly seen vi­su­al man­age­ment in prac­tice be­fore. For me, tick­ets went straight to Fog­Bugz or TFS and re­mained there,…
  featured 8 management 34 agile 10 productivity 36 communication 27 workplace 7 backlog 2
• Cables labeling Re­cent­ly, I was adding new serv­er hard­ware. I took it as an op­por­tu­ni­ty to rewire all net­work ca­bles. This ar­ti­cle ex­plains how the task was per­formed. Ca­bles man­age­ment is like reg­u­lar back­ups: every­body (by every­body, I mean peo­ple who ac­tu­al­ly…
  hardware 11 datacenter 4 cables-management 1
• Brooks's law in Agile projects I was re­cent­ly asked whether [Brook's law][1] ap­plies to Ag­ile pro­jects as well. By Ag­ile pro­jects, the per­son ask­ing the ques­tion means ac­tu­al, real Ag­ile pro­jects, the ones where can­cel­ing a pro­ject and re­sum­ing it sev­er­al months lat­er with a…
  management 34 agile 10 short 50
• Taking hostages with Waterfall It is ear­ly sum­mer, year 2013. A com­pa­ny I was work­ing for starts a new pro­ject sched­uled for re­lease in Sep­tem­ber. A few days ear­li­er, the pro­ject man­ag­er de­ter­mines that the pro­ject should take…
  management 34 agile 10 communication 27
• Do requirements matter? For the last decade, I've met in my life hun­dreds of French pro­gram­mers, de­vel­op­ers, leads and CTOs. None of them knew the dif­fer­ence be­tween func­tion­al and non-func­tion­al re­quire­ments. This wouldn't be so dis­turb­ing if it were lim­it­ed to France:…
  requirements 3 communication 27
• Trial-screens setup: the definitive guide You got your sec­ond mon­i­tor. You've seen how much it en­hances (or de­grades) your pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. Now, you are dream­ing of hav­ing three mon­i­tors. Or maybe you don't have dual-screens set­up and you're jump­ing straight to three mon­i­tors set­up. Or maybe…
  featured 8 workplace 7 productivity 36 hardware 11
• Les rencontres nationales du numérique Le 13 no­vem­bre à Poitiers se sont déroulés les ren­con­tres na­tionales du numérique, un événe­ment or­gan­isé par l'as­so­ci­a­tion Réseau des pro­fes­sion­nels du numérique (SPN). Un événe­ment in­téres­sant aus­si bien en ce qui con­cerne les su­jets abor­dés que les…
  french 4
• Linters rock, but they are slow I love lin­ters. I love them so much that I'm ac­tu­al­ly con­sid­er­ing to use some of them at pre-com­mit stage to re­ject com­mits which con­tain er­rors. The only thing which is the rea­son I hes­i­tate to do it is that some of them are quite slow. Cur­rent­ly,…
  code-style 3 quality 36 productivity 36
• 80 columns limit I re­call dis­cussing 80 columns lim­it a year ago with a friend of mine. It's fun to read this part now, to see how I changed, and to try to un­der­stand what could my friend tell me to con­vince me that I was wrong. This is the quote I'm talk­ing about: I…
  code-style 3 short 50
• Dunning–Kruger effect Dun­ning–Kruger ef­fect con­sists for un­skilled per­sons to be­lieve that they are more ex­pe­ri­enced, and for high­ly skilled per­sons to un­der­es­ti­mate their lev­el, be­liev­ing that tasks, which they find easy,…
  hiring 15 quality 36
• Extensibility When mod­i­fy­ing a sys­tem (such as adding fea­tures), one should be con­cerned about the abil­i­ty of the sys­tem to be mod­i­fied. This im­plies the pres­ence of two ex­ten­si­bil­i­ty as­pects: ar­chi­tec­tur­al and qual­i­ty-cen­tered. I be­lieve it is es­sen­tial to…
  refactoring 12
• Roadmaps, goals, morale, beliefs and motivation One of the as­pects of de­vel­op­er per­for­mance to con­sid­er is the avail­abil­i­ty of the roadmap, a roadmap which is very pre­cise near the point the per­son is, and less pre­cise far from it. Why is it im­por­tant for a de­vel­op­er to have an im­me­di­ate ac­cess to…
  management 34 backlog 2
• Les non-talents Après avoir écrit la série d'ar­ti­cles sur la recherche des tal­ents, j'ai reçu de nom­breux com­men­taires et ques­tions de la part, no­tam­ment, des développeurs français. Pour beau­coup, je dois faire une pré­ci­sion : cette série d'ar­ti­cles par­lait des…
  hiring 15 french 4
• Hiring process part 4 · after the interview In 2013, I was search­ing for a flat in Paris. For peo­ple who are not fa­mil­iar with this spe­cif­ic task of search­ing for a flat in this spe­cif­ic city, I should ex­plain that flats are huge­ly ex­pen­sive there, but there are still many per­sons who search…
  hiring 15
• Hiring process part 3 · interview The can­di­date is in the hall, wait­ing for the in­ter­view. What should be your next steps? How to guide the can­di­date through the process of the in­ter­view? Prob­a­bly the worst thing a com­pa­ny can do is to have a per­son from hu­man re­sources in charge of…
  hiring 15
• Hiring process part 2 · finding and capturing talented people It's dif­fi­cult to in­ter­view can­di­dates for a spe­cif­ic job. It's scary to hire some­body who shouldn't be hired, and it's un­for­tu­nate if you don't hire some­one who should be hired. While it's prac­ti­cal­ly im­pos­si­ble to sug­gest any­thing on the choice…
  hiring 15
• Hiring process part 1 · job posting When I worked as a free­lancer, one of the tasks I did was to help com­pa­nies hir­ing tal­ent­ed peo­ple. Aside the case of Melusyn start­up, I was most­ly han­dling the tech­ni­cal in­ter­views with the can­di­dates, and gave my ad­vice to the com­pa­ny: this…
  hiring 15
• What's wrong with SQL Server's FILESTREAM? Mi­crosoft SQL Serv­er con­tains a fea­ture called FILESTREAM. For those who don't use SQL Serv­er, in short, this fea­ture al­lows to store very large chunks of data in a data­base with all the ben­e­fits and none of the draw­backs. Un­der the hood, Mi­crosoft…
  database 2 short 50
• Relevance of tags on Careers Ca­reers pro­files in­cludes a list of tags the per­son is top 10%, top 20% and top 30% in. Sur­pris­ing­ly (maybe not), those tags are fol­lowed re­li­gious­ly by some re­cruiters. They make a big mis­take. If we want tags to be rel­e­vant, i.e. to have a…
  tagging 4 stack-exchange 4 hiring 15
• Programming made easy When I start­ed pro­gram­ming, a few peo­ple around me told me that this may not be the smartest ca­reer path, be­cause it may hap­pen that in a few decades, we won't need pro­gram­mers any longer. The idea is…
  hiring 15
• Code duplication Be­gin­ners' code is al­ways an amaz­ing op­por­tu­ni­ty to re­move code du­pli­ca­tion, as well as ex­plain what code du­pli­ca­tion is to the orig­i­nal au­thor. I was re­view­ing a few thou­sand LOC, so I thought this is an op­por­tu­ni­ty to post an ex­am­ple and to show…
  refactoring 12
• Eyestrain A few months ago, I left the com­pa­ny, but it's only to­day that I un­der­stood why I of­ten had headaches and eye­strain at work, and I rarely have that when work­ing at home. At home, I un­con­scious­ly fol­low the next pat­tern: work for ten min­utes to an…
  workplace 7 hardware 11 short 50
• Comments classification This is a bad com­ment: int i = 0; i + 1; // adding 1 to i should work but dont work i dont know why!!!! print(i);For every good com­ment, I've seen hun­dreds of bad com­ments. They harm the code base and give the wrong im­pres­sion to the au­thor that he…
  quality 36 refactoring 12 featured 8
• Process purists and productivity · Picky about methodology Re­cent­ly, I found [an old ques­tion][1] from 2011 on Pro­gram­mers.SE. The orig­i­nal poster ex­plained a prob­lem his team has when us­ing Scrum, and asked for ad­vice. From his ques­tion, it also ap­peared that he's not ac­tu­al­ly us­ing Scrum, but rather…
  productivity 36 agile 10
• Custom search engine Many e-com­merce web­sites im­ple­ment their own search en­gine. Many do it wrong, so wrong that they lose po­ten­tial cus­tomers they won't lose if they had no search en­gine at all. Google pro­vides an easy to im­ple­ment way to search for stuff with­in Google…
  rant 34
• Coffee maker Take a cof­fee mak­er. What is its pur­pose? Its only pur­pose is to make cof­fee. It’s the only thing it does and knows. It has only one but­ton, and every­body know how to use it. Now take the Boe­ing 787. How many but­tons are there? How many peo­ple can…
  rant 34 short 50
• Don't ask writing good code What a sur­prise. Af­ter be­ing asked for months to sim­ply write code as fast as pos­si­ble, with no think­ing or test­ing, man­age­ment sud­den­ly crit­i­cized one of the col­leagues, be­cause the code of a new, un­sta­ble fea­ture im­ple­ment­ed to­day con­tains long…
  management 34 quality 36 short 50
• Closed source, secrecy and trust Most com­pa­nies which pro­duce source code don't re­lease it in the wild. They are hid­ing it, pro­tect­ing it against unau­tho­rized ac­cess, ob­fus­cate it, make you sign NDA and ask them­selves how they can be sure that the code will nev­er ever reach…
  quality 36 rant 34
• Seven lies to stakeholders Those are the points that are fre­quent­ly sub­ject of mis­un­der­stand­ings or plain mis­in­for­ma­tion be­tween IT per­son­nel and stake­hold­ers. En­coun­ter­ing one of sev­er­al of those points in a pro­ject is a good in­di­ca­tion that com­mu­ni­ca­tion should be re­viewed.…
  communication 27 management 34
• Permanent prototype Each pro­ject fol­lows more or less one of the fol­low­ing mod­els, some­times sev­er­al of them com­bined: De­sign first, It­er­a­tive, Per­ma­nent pro­to­type. The first two ones are well-known. The first one is the clas­si­cal Wa­ter­fall mod­el. Pri­or to de­vel­op­ment,…
  management 34
• Do you really care about security? A $25,000-scale pro­ject is or­dered by a large multi­na­tion­al cor­po­ra­tion. They claim they should be and are se­cure, since se­cu­ri­ty is cru­cial for them. Ask them how much of the bud­get of the pro­ject is al­lo­cat­ed to se­cu­ri­ty. They won't an­swer, be­cause…
  security 8 short 50
• Ascending and descending representations of quality There are many pro­jects which start with very low ex­pec­ta­tions of the qual­i­ty of the source code and pro­ject or­ga­ni­za­tion. The idea is to get some­thing which sim­ply works, start to sell it, and then, ei­ther con­tin­u­ous­ly or in one bru­tal step,…
  management 34 quality 36 short 50
• Don't use it, it's slow Re­cent­ly, I’ve re­ceived an e-mail like this from a col­league of mine, the e-mail be­ing sent to a few peo­ple in the com­pa­ny: “FYI, we have re­moved SQL com­put­ed columns used when com­put­ing the gauges. The prof­it is im­pres­sive: the prices are now loaded…
  performance 13 profiling 4
• Time estimation. Done. When I start­ed my ca­reer as a free­lancer, I used to re­cur to or­di­nary tech­niques of the good old wa­ter­fall-style pro­ject man­age­ment. It is not sur­pris­ing that I also scrupu­lous­ly tried to de­ter­mine the time and the cost of a pro­ject be­fore start­ing…
  management 34
• Dockyard of ships that can’t sail Bad­ly man­aged pro­jects of­ten share an el­e­ment: the will­ing­ness to de­liv­er all fea­tures in a giv­en amount of time and with­in bud­get. Giv­en how we con­cep­tu­al­ize the no­tion of a de­liv­er­able out­side IT…
  management 34 rant 34
• Playing the Russian roulette with your business · the excitement of the randomness Af­ter spend­ing a few months in an or­di­nary small French soft­ware de­vel­op­ment com­pa­ny, I’m tru­ly amazed at the ef­fort which makes the whole process high­ly un­pre­dictable and in­creas­es the odds of fail­ing at every step. If work­ing for a well-or­ga­nized…
  management 34 risk 1 rant 34
• Review and refactor Soft­wa­reEngi­neer­ing.SE is a good place for in­ter­est­ing ques­tions. One of the re­cent ques­tions about unit tests was par­tic­u­lar­ly in­ter­est­ing: not for its unit test­ing part, but for giv­ing a small piece of code which may seem par­tic­u­lar­ly…
  code-review 2 unit-testing 6 reliability 2
• Tags and categories: what's the difference? This ar­ti­cle was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished on Stack Ex­change. Is there a dif­fer­ence be­tween tags and cat­e­gories? Is this dif­fer­ence clear for peo­ple with­out tech­ni­cal back­ground, i.e. or­di­nary users? Tags…
  user-experience 10 tagging 4
• Pooling and performance: what benchmarks and profiling may reveal When bench­mark­ing Or­seis, I dis­cov­ered that with repet­i­tive queries, its per­for­mance dras­ti­cal­ly de­cline. In some con­di­tions, it was more than ten times slow­er com­pared to the di­rect us­age of ADO.NET. This is to­tal­ly un­ac­cept­able for a li­brary which…
  profiling 4 performance 13 benchmark 1 optimization 2
• Choosing a color for a brand It is not un­usu­al for some com­pa­nies to spend nu­mer­ous meet­ings dis­cussing the col­or(s) to use for a logo of a prod­uct. Some may waste hours or days be­cause no­body agrees about the col­or(s) but every­one agrees that choos­ing the wrong col­or will…
  management 34 meetings 1
• The cost of always-on, never fail It is not un­usu­al for the com­pa­nies of any size to or­der a web­site which should “nev­er fail”. Busi­ness-wise, this re­quire­ment is un­der­stand­able: if your cor­po­rate web­site is down, you're not giv­ing a pos­i­tive im­age of your com­pa­ny. The only is­sue is…
  reliability 2 business-continuity 1 short 50
• Deliver first, develop later No mat­ter which work­flow is cho­sen by a team, there is one com­mon flaw: the prod­uct is shipped only when it’s done. In this con­text, it is not sur­pris­ing that many prod­ucts fail to be de­liv­ered on time. The de­liv­ery process is both com­pli­cat­ed and…
  management 34
• Quantifying time and cost: why do we always get it wrong? Dis­cus­sions like this hap­pen all the time when you work in IT. You are giv­en a sum­ma­ry which bare­ly de­scribe the pro­ject, you have no time think­ing about it, and then you re­ceive a strong pres­sure from your boss be­cause some PHP code mon­key from a…
  communication 27 quality 36 management 34
• Quality and practice: convincing as a consultant When you act as a con­sul­tant in a com­pa­ny, the first thing you must re­mem­ber is that you're not the per­son who takes the de­ci­sions. While you might be the source of in­fi­nite wis­dom, peo­ple will lis­ten to you, or they will not. When your voice is not…
  communication 27 quality 36
• Morceau de code avant l'entretien Lorsque je recherche des prestataires in­dépen­dants ou des développeurs pour moi ou mes clients, un point paraît pri­mor­dial : s'as­sur­er que le can­di­dat sait écrire du code. Dès les tous pre­miers en­tre­tiens, je de­mandais sys­té­ma­tique­ment aux can­di­dats…
  interview 1 french 4
• The surprisingly bad PhpBB Ph­pBB al­ways sur­prised me. At every new ver­sion, [the pro­ject is rewrit­ten from scratch][1], which is a good op­por­tu­ni­ty to fi­nal­ly do the in­ter­ac­tion de­sign cor­rect­ly, and still, it's as bad as it was in June 2000 when the first ver­sion was…
  interaction-design 9 data-structures 2 short 50
• A failure as an opportunity Fail­ures hap­pen, es­pe­cial­ly in soft­ware de­vel­op­ment in­dus­try, where mul­ti­ple fac­tors can in­duce fail­ure, from un­re­al­is­tic ex­pec­ta­tions by the cus­tomer to the in­com­pe­ten­cy of the staff to the se­vere…
  management 34 communication 27
• Refactoring It is not un­usu­al to find a piece of code which has se­vere is­sues and can­not be main­tained as is. It can ac­tu­al­ly come from a less ex­pe­ri­enced col­league, a low qual­i­ty in­ter­net re­source, or even… your­self. In all those cas­es, the code re­quires…
  refactoring 12
• Faut-il embaucher un développeur inexpérimenté ? Lorsqu’on est at­ten­tif à ce qui se dit dans les com­mu­nautés comme les sites de Stack Ex­change, ou en­core par les lead­ers, tels que Joel Spolky, en matière de l’or­gan­i­sa­tion du tra­vail au sein des…
  workplace 7 management 34 hiring 15 french 4