Category: Philosophy
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On Password Security
If you are storing user-entered passwords in your system, it’s imperative to keep those passwords as secure as possible. With all the systems that require passwords, users often end up reusing one or two passwords for many sites. As users also often reuse usernames (or use a single email for all sites) that means if…
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Psychology of a “pretty good” programmer
(This post refers to no single person or job, but is describing a personality type I and others have encountered) Just to get this out of the way, a really bad programmer is easy to spot-a truly bad programmer can be a perfect storm of inability to understand and unwillingness to try, a lack of…
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NHibernate and Entity Framework Battle it Out in the Real World
The scene: a company division with no prior in-house experience using any ORM of any kind. A really, really legacy database-the kind with many composite keys, fields with mystery names, uneven use of enforced keys, etc. Currently, access done through ADO teamed with stored procs containing dynamic sql involving string concatenations (horrible for speed, security…
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Broken Windows
We all know the broken windows idea, but Jan did a nice, clear write-up of it. such a simple idea, so hard to fight in the day-to-day. Professional Under Pressure
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Working Effectively with Legacy Code
I mentioned this book in an earlier blog, and I’ve started to read it. (I was somewhere around 2/3 through Martin Fowler’s Refactoring, and in the weeds of arcane refactoring patterns when I decided to switch out) I’m maybe 70 pages in, and I have to say Working Effectively With Legacy Code thus far seems…
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Pain encourages change? Not sure I buy it.
A frequently repeated theme on the Alt.Net list is that certain ideas, like IoC, are not understood until you feel significant pain, and you’ll be motivated to try something new. From Derik Whittaker’s post today, “[…] do this not because he is told or shown, but because he is in so much pain because of…
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Top 5 reasons why “The customer is Always Right” is wrong
Pretty related to an earlier post I made about how programming shops are not dry cleaners… It’s not saying ignore the customer, but that random customer demands aren’t the way to run a business well. Top 5 reasons why “The customer is Always Right” is wrong
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Managing Mangers
A spot-on post by SerialSeb… http://serialseb.blogspot.com/2007/11/managing-managers.html
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Software Development is not Dry Cleaning
“Of course software development is not dry cleaning!”, you might be saying. However, it’s apparently a not-so-obvious idea. As a services-oriented software company, what’s your role? Is it to deliver “satisfaction guaranteed” ? It it to do whatever it takes to get things done on time, and if there are delays, to do what it…