Is your keyboard jammed, or are you just writing Haskell?
I’ve been getting back into Haskell lately because I’ve been using the XMonad window manager, which is written and configured in Haskell. Haskell has always held a special place in…
The Trifecta of FAIL; or, how to patch Rails 2.0 for Ruby 1.8.7
It’s an oft-stated fact that most disasters result not from a single point of failure but from a combination of failures reinforcing each other. I wouldn’t term the problem I…
Epic Fail, or, why the users hate us.
[I’m reposting this from my “personal journal”:http://avdi.livejournal.com as it has development applicability – in so much as it is a tale about how NOT to design software.] So I’ve been…
Why Your Social Website Should Support OpenID
On Twitter I bitched about GitHub not supporting OpenID, and both Chris Wanstrath and Giles Bowkett chided me for not making an better argument for it than “it makes my…
Professionalism
I’ve been thinking a lot about the subject of professionalism in the context of software development lately. As I see it, there are two strains of professionalism. There are, for…