Software Development

How we stress tested an app thousands pictures taken at the exact same time

Stress testing our app…

Programming & Music

Whenever a classical musician talks about his career, he mentions his teachers. They usually had one to three experienced musicians who taught them in such a way that it changed their playing and careers. Real mentors (in fact, to enhance my point: I started to write this a while ago, but I…

How to teach art (or at least software design)

There are many things that are straightforward to teach. Even some stuff that people consider “a talent”. Drawing technique, for example. You can learn how to draw: buy a couple books or go to classes to learn some theory, then fill 200 pages of…

The art of debugging

Pesky bugs and how I smack them.

1. Code review. After writing anything I check it myself (don’t…

Beautiful code

Sometimes beauty is about contents.

Black Box Programming

Two developers here faced different but related problems lately. In essence their question to me could be: “should I use a framework/library even though I do not know how it works at all?” They were not trying to reinvent the wheel, but they wanted to know what was under the hood before…

The raging bull strategy

The behavior I see most frequently in young developers is what one of them described to me as the “raging bull strategy”. I loved the name. It means “just keep trying random things until it works.”