Software Development

Tips for optimizing the performance of development teams. There are all sorts of analogies for software development teams (“teams are like a box of chocolates” etc.), and one I find very useful is to picture them as distributed information processing systems. Each worker process (person) has a job to do…

Complexity is managed, not beaten — “Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.” ― Edsger Wybe Dijkstra Developers are told Keep it simple stupid (KISS) but no one explains why code should be simple or the benefits…

One of the favorite definitions of laziness sounds like this: “Laziness is the art of taking rest before getting tired. Because prevention is better than cure.” And sure. It really depends on how you do spend this lazy time. As with many other things, there is a healthy and unhealthy…

A clear demonstration of the timeit module — Have you ever wondered if it’s slower to call a function with keywords than without? In other words: which is faster; positional arguments (myfunc('mike', 33)) or kwargs (myfunc(name='mike', age=33))? In this short and simple article we find out if it is worth sacrificing the readability of passing keywords arguments vs…

I want to talk about two specific kinds of things. — I’ve been getting a good deal of encouragement to talk about multithreaded programming some more, as it seems to be an area of great technical interest to many of you out there in developer land. It’s also quite obviously an area of some considerable pain… I want to talk about…