Monthly Archives: October 2010
National Rail Enquiries Have Killed My UK Train Times App
About a year ago I wrote a simple web application to present UK train times in a simple format for mobile phone users.
…and today National Rail killed it. Continue reading
Sysadmins: how to make the programmers love you
Last week I wrote a piece called “Programmers: how to make the sysadmin love you”. Comments have led me to realise it needs a counterpart: one written from the perspective of the systems guy trying to get along with the dev team. Having offended all the programmers of the world (and several Americans who don’t know what a fag packet is) it’s time to do the same for you systems folk. Continue reading
Programmers: how to make the systems guy love you
The most common problem with specs is when they’re written by someone without an idea of the things programmers really need to know. They know what they’d like the product to do but overlook “make it robust” or “make it easy to setup on our CentOS 5.5 servers”. To non-engineers these objectives are obscure and here a problem arises – when they go unmentioned it’s easy to fulfill the specification while producing an article that’s a total pain in the butt. A project may be declared a success but still it can be excruciating for people to maintain, compile, release, troubleshoot or in any other way interact with.
Here’s how to avoid that… Continue reading
So you want to go freelance…
Today an old friend emailed me for advice about quitting his day job and going freelance. He’s been in the business for ten years and has great wisdom in the field of C/C++ games programming. I got halfway through writing a response then realised hey, others might benefit too. It’s UK-centric but hackers elsewhere may find it interesting. Continue reading
Tablets. What are they good for?
It’s a fortnight since my Android tablet arrived. They’re growing increasingly mainstream – even the UK clothing chain Next (!) have brought out something suspiciously similar…