Developing Programmers .com

For those who aren’t already keeping up with the hilarity of xkcd, today’s is especially funny and even relevant here!

http://xkcd.com/327/

Developing Programmers has been down for a while, due to a power supply “exploding” (figuratively). “Trouble” has migrated the whole system to another machine in another country and it’s now up and running again! Yay! The new server location should be faster for US visitors; and sadly a bit slower for readers in Australia.

This week I have spent most of my time writing documentation as quickly as I can for the job I am leaving.

They already have up to date API documentation etc, but they need more insights into the “big picture” of the software components and what the major ideas are in there without getting bogged down with details.

To help achieve this I’ve been scanning pages from my project notebook (yes, this is a physical book in which I write notes and draw sketches). I’m interleaving these scans with text in the wiki documentation for the project.

Scanning hand-drawn images is helping productivity impressively: I don’t have to get out the drawing software and make it look nice. I can add written notes around each page to explain how it fits in and add any references, links etc that I need. The style of the result reminds me a little of Powerpoint presentations, with the diagrams each followed by notes on what I’d want to say about each page.

Next time you have a great idea that you don’t have time to write up properly, consider taking whatever you have (even if it’s a diagram sketched on a satay-stained napkin at a restaurant) and throw it on the scanner. It’s better to have hand drawn images up on the internal documentation web site than missing documentation

I have just accepted a new job at CVSDude.com!

CVSDude offers online services for developers, such as revision control, bug tracking, documentation wikis, etc. This means I will be developing and supporting software that helps people to carry out some of the practices that I originally set up this site to promote. It’s a very suitable job and is in line with my views about programming practices.

This great bit of news does lead to an important consequence:

I now have a financial interest in people adopting the use of some of the software I promote here.

Naturally my belief that these development tools are essential is what led me to the job, not the other way around. But the interest has to be put out in the open so you can make up your own mind how much faith to have in what I say

I recently noticed this FAQ by Bjarne Stroustrup himself on various aspects of why C++ is designed the way it is, how to get the most out of it in various common situations, and how Stroustrup responds to questions about features from other languages like Java and C#.

If you use C++ at all, or if you are interested in languages in general as I am, then it’s well worth a read.