Kyle Cordes’s Software Site
Oct 31 2007
I’ve been a fan of Joel Spolsky for years, though I haven’t agreed with everything he’s written, and even mocked him a bit. Joel has written at length on his web site and in print about attracting the best developers, and one aspect of that has bothered me:
How do you attract top developers to work [...]
Oct 16 2007
Ben Collins-Sussman, one of the key developers behind Subversion, argues in Version Control and the 80% that distributed version control will remain a niche interest, and will not move in to the mainstream (as his favorite tool certainly has). He has a number of good reasons to back up this thesis.
I think he’s wrong. The [...]
Oct 16 2007
This is an oldie-but-goodie: Guy Steele’s “Growing a Language” talk from OOPSLA 1998.
It is amazing to me that Guy, whose is something of a legend in language design, and who thinks so clearly about what makes a good language, was also key in designing Java. Java has been extremely slow to grow in the sense [...]
Oct 11 2007
Last night at SLUUG, I have a talk on distributed source control tools. It was quite introductory, but the notes (below) may still be helpful. These notes were on a handout at the talk, as usual I didn’t use slides.
Unfortunately I didn’t get an audio recording of this talk, so no transcript either.
About 30 people [...]
Oct 01 2007
A recurring theme in our projects is a desire to “fix things so they stay fixed”. I have in mind writing about that idea in detail later, but for now I’ll start with an example of how to do so.
A common and useful thing to do with disk storage space is to keep old copies [...]
Oct 01 2007
Where: SLUUG (though my talk is not listed on the site yet)
When: October 10th, meeting starts at 6:30 PM
I’ll introduce distributed source control tools:
A short tour of the basic use of git, bzr, and hg (Mercurial)
Thoughts on why you’d want to use a distributed source control tool at all, vs. a centralized system like SVN [...]
