cpp4theselftaught.com temporarily down

Posted on August 14, 2017 by rlc

The C++ for the self-taught site is temporarily down for “unscheduled maintenance” (i.e. a bug).

I haven’t had time to look into fixing it yet: I just found out it was misbehaving about an hour ago, during my routine check of my websites. I’ll try to fix it tonight and update this post when I have news. 

If you want to help out: you could donate to my BitCoin address 1JE9wominCU1mw1JtD7JWu8vfYfcGQ9pKj.

Update (21:58 EDT): 
An automatic updates seems to have bugged out and left the site inoperable. According to the logs this happened sometime during my vacation. The site looks OK now — please let me know if you see anything awry.

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The problem with making things too easy

Posted on July 21, 2017 by rlc

The TL;DR:



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Posted in Anecdotes, Software Development, Software Engineering | Tagged , | 1 Comment

“Police hack PGP server” — really?

Posted on March 23, 2017 by rlc

This afternoon, this headline caught my attention: “Police hack PGP server with 3.6 million messages from organized crime BlackBerrys“. When I read it, I thought: “either the journalist/title writer got it wrong, or PGP is broken”.
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Writing unmaintainable code in five easy steps

Posted on March 4, 2017 by rlc

I have recently had to modify some code that, to say the least, was very hard to maintain — or refactor, for that matter.

The following are a few, firmly tongue-in-cheek, steps to make sure your code is thoroughly frustrating to whoever needs to maintain it after you.
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Posted in Anecdotes | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Meetings, meetings, and more meetings

Posted on November 16, 2016 by rlc

Recently, I spent a significant part of the day in a meeting reviewing the year’s progress on several projects, including the introduction of an agile methodology — Scrum. The approach in the meeting was simple: write on a sticky note what we did well, and on another what we should not repeat or how we should improve. The subject was “Scrum/agile”. I only wrote one sticky note: “get rid of Scrum”.

The TL;DR:
Scrum, in my opinion, is (moderately) useful for small teams with a single, short-term project — something like a web application. The overhead it imposes vastly outweighs the benefits for larger teams and larger projects.

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Debugging — or: what I do for a living

Posted on September 12, 2016 by rlc

I am often asked by friends and acquaintances of various backgrounds, what I do for a living. Depending on my mood at the time, I can answer in any number of ways, but invariably my answers are met with blank stares, questions that clearly demonstrate that I have once again failed to make myself understood and an eventual change of subject.
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Really, Twitterverse?

Posted on September 10, 2016 by rlc
Felicia, our cat, relaxing

This gallery contains 1 photo.

The Twitterverse has spoken, quietly, with a single vote — a cat it is…

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Setting up a Xubuntu-based kiosk

Posted on July 27, 2016 by rlc

This is another “HOWTO” post — setting up a Xubuntu-based kiosk, which I did to make a new “TV” for my kids.

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Technocracy II

Posted on May 24, 2016 by rlc

In my previous post, I described technocracy as something that is positive in project and product management, and in team organization. In this post, to supply a boundary to my previous text, I will make the case for the opposite.
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Technocracy

Posted on May 21, 2016 by rlc

In a discussion with a “Product Owner” recently, I told him I take a more technocratic approach to project management than they did. We discussed different project management styles for the next hour or so.

TL;DR: I believe that

  • to effectively and efficiently run a large team of developers who are collectively responsible for a product with a large code-base, that team needs to be organized as a network of smaller teams with experts leading each of those smaller teams, and
  • to successfully manage an “agile” development team and create a viable product, one has to have a vision and break it down from there.


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Posted in Software Development, Software Engineering | Tagged | Comments Off on Technocracy