“Software Engineering Proverbs” collected by Tom Van Vleck is an excellent place to pick up a smart thought or two. Many of these are good for email signatures and stuff like that. Another point to note is that these do often apply to people other than software engineers too.
Category: Programming
A big part of my work has to do with code. I’ve worked as system administrator – installing, patching, and configuring someone else’s code. I’ve worked as independent programmer, writing code on my own. I also programmed as part of the team. And on top of that, I worked as Team Leader and Project Manager, where I had to interact a lot with programmers. Programming world on its own is as huge as the universe. There is always something to learn. When I find something worthy or something that I understand enough to write about, I share it in this category.
Don’t Be Afraid to Drop the SOAP
Ok, I know that linking to two articles from the same source in a row is bad, but I don’t do it so often, so here it goes…
Perl.com has this article called “Don’t Be Afraid to Drop the SOAP” where Sam Tregar (the guy from about.com, the author of HTML::Template, HTML:: Pager, Inline::Guile, Devel:: Profiler and few others) explains why he had to drop SOAP from the application and go for something handmade. That is an interesting story that shows a number of goods and bads of SOAP as a part of solution to one specific problem.
FMTYEWTK About Mass Edits In Perl
There is a very usefule article on Perl.com – “FMTYEWTK About Mass Edits In Perl“. It is about making changes in a bunch of files using a simple Perl script, or a one-liner, or even straight from command line. All the information is old, but it is nicely collected in one single article, which can come handy pretty often.
FMTYEWTK stands for Fare More Than You Ever Wanted To Know, by the way.
MIT OpenCourseWare
There is a saying that goes something like: all new is just forgotten old. Sometimes it is very useful to go through old news and refresh your memory. There are things which were not important before but are now. There are things that you skipped accidentally. There are things that passed the edge of your memory.
I’ve mentioned MIT OpenCourseWare, I think, to everyone I know. Moreover, I did it several times. For those who still don’t what I am talking about – MIT OpenCourseWare is an effort of Massachusetts Institute of Technology to make all its study materials available for the general public free of charge and in open formats. They have started with this program several years ago and they are following the plan until now.
Here is a quote for you from their recent mailing.
How Big is the MIT OCW Web Site?
The MIT OCW Web site now offers free and open access to 914 courses, ranging from 33 academic disciplines and all five of MIT schools — Architecture and Planning,Engineering, Science, Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and the Sloan School of Management. With more than 900 courses available, users frequently ask, “Just how much educational content is really available on the MIT OCW Web site?”
MIT OCW is a content-rich Web site that is 48 gigabytes in size; offering courses that contain 14,717 HTML pages, 15,640 unique PDF documents, and 16,078 images — overall 55,171 total files for use by MIT’s global audience. All of this is made available through the generosity of 536 MIT faculty, with many more signed on for future publication cycles.
Worth checking out – don’t you think?
Programming Assignment Guide For CS Students
Today’s article – “Programming Assignment Guide For CS Students” – at Slashdot started an interesting discussion. There are comments with links to other common mistakes, guides to programming in general and different programming languages in particular. People share their experiences, tricks and tips. There are even talks on the subject of programming while intoxicated by alcohol (or anything else for that matter).