I'm working on a book for people new to programming in industry. My reader may be:

• A college student looking to become a professional programmer, wondering what school's not teaching them;

• A recent grad who's working but has noticed that there's a lot more to professional work than what you learned in school;

• Someone coming to programming from a completely different field, who got their feet wet and now wants to make programming a career.

Is this you? Yes? Let's talk. I'm putting together an advisory panel of "target audience" readers, whose goal is to make sure I'm answering your questions. The scope of this topic is nearly infinite; the number of pages I've got to make a high-impact book is not. I need to keep it tight and focused on the topics that are most useful to you.

In return for your help, you'll get early access to chapters as I write them. I'll try to swing a copy of the paper book for you, too, when it's printed.

Interested? Send me an email.

I know this might come as a shock to you, but most programming job applicants suck. I've interviewed my fair share this month, and it'll be a lot easier for all of us if I tell you upfront what I'm looking for.

As a hiring manager, my job is to make sure you can do the job you're applying for. For programming that means you need to be able to program. So when I whip out a laptop in our round-one interview and ask you to write some code, try to hide your terrified expression.

Continue reading "Dear Programming Job Applicants..." »

This is an open question to programmers: is it worth teaching someone assembly language anymore? My instinctive reaction is "of course," but let me explain why I'm second-guessing that instinct.

The Case For

Back in the 1990's I had my moment of revelation: a pal of mine, a far more experienced programmer than me, showed me how C code compiled into assembly. This was on the Motorola 68K instruction set. I learned to walk through how the stack works, how pointers work, how loops work... it all finally made sense. From that time forward, I've had no fear of C or C++ because I know how the language morphs the code I write into the code the computer sees.

Continue reading "Is it Worth Teaching Assembly?" »

My daughter Genevieve performing in her first ballet recital. Photo toned to black-and-white using Alien Skin Exposure.

First, thanks to all the readers who followed my PragProWriMo 2009 writing--your support was invaluable. I'm happy to announce that Pragmatic Bookshelf picked up my book in December and I'm busy finishing the first draft. I'm not sure how long the whole process will take, the optimist in me wants to believe I can finish by the end of the year. Either way I'm very excited to bring this book to fruition and the folks at Pragmatic are fantastic to work with.

Yes, PragProWriMo 2009 was over yesterday. However, I can’t introduce the topic of quality and then just stop there, can I? After this it’s time to start working on my book proposal.

There are two approaches to building a quality product: build it in from the beginning, or beat it in afterward. The former approach requires a lot of discipline and effort from the engineering team. The latter requires a lot of testing and, again, effort from the engineering team.

Continue reading "Quality: Beginning vs. Afterward" »

This is intended to introduce a chapter on quality. There’s a myriad of topics here; this post is merely setting the stage.

I take it as a given that any product should be a high-quality product. Why bother making it otherwise? This seems like a straightforward goal, but the technology industry has had a hell of a time figuring out how to build quality software. There’s a joke that’s been around for at least a decade:

There’s word in business circles that the computer industry likes to measure itself against the Big Three auto-makers. The comparison goes this way: If automotive technology had kept pace with Silicon Valley, motorists could buy a V-32 engine that goes 10,000 m.p.h. or a 30-pound car that gets 1,000 miles to the gallon—either one at a sticker price of less than $50. Detroit’s response: “OK. But who would want a car that crashes twice a day?”

Any good joke has an element of truth to it—this one especially so. Auto makers can build cars that’ll drive hundreds of thousands of miles, but Windows 95 would crash after 49.7 days of continuous operation—a bug that took four years to discover 1 because other bugs would crash Windows 95 long before 49.7 days could pass.

Continue reading "Quality is Job 0.99999" »

Portrait of my grandmother. I don't consider myself a portrait artist but I do get lucky once in a while. On-site lighting was two flashes bounced off the ceiling. Photo toned to black-and-white using Exposure 2 and vignetted with Bokeh.

It used to be that the “user interface” for a computer was assembly language and its “user manual” was the programming manual. Back in those days, the distinction between the physical machine and its programming interface was somewhat academic.

These days, there’s a lot more layers involved. Taking the “simple” example of C++, the layers could look like this:

In this example, the physical machine is a x86, 64 bit. The machine’s architecture has various ramifications, for example a 64 bit machine can allow a single process to address much more memory than a 32 bit machine. The operating system has numerous implications; any “system call” like accessing a file goes through the operating system. Then there’s the libraries, for example the C standard library which provides functions like printf() for formatted output. Then there’s the programming language itself.

Continue reading "Platforms" »

There are few topics that can get programmers riled up more than programming languages. Language flame-wars have been raging on Usenet since about the dawn of Usenet. They’ll continue burning until, as best I can tell, the end of time. Why? The programming language is your most-used tool (second only to your text editor) and it takes a long time to master, so it’s reasonable that people get attached to their languages.

In college you likely focused on one “do it all” language like Java. There’s nothing wrong with Java, in fact it’s a great language. The problem is the “do it all” part—no language does it all, at least not well. You simply cannot be productive and versatile without knowing a couple programming languages.

Continue reading "Programming Languages" »