Recently we chose Jira as our new bug database, for reasons mostly explained in my previous post (at least, those were my reasons – other people were involved, no doubt with their own reasons). We were on Bugzilla before, which did us proud for many years, but we needed something a little more fully-featured in [...]
Archive for the ‘Software development’ Category
My love for plugins, reaffirmed
Posted in Realtime Worlds, Software development on September 1, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Debugging web traffic
Posted in Software development on June 17, 2009 | 1 Comment »
I had a curious little problem recently: in our new bug database, we couldn’t play video attachments within the browser (e.g. with the VLC plugin for Firefox, or Windows Media Player embedded in IE). You could download the video as a file and play it – fine. You could launch a media player as an [...]
Overtime, done right
Posted in Realtime Worlds, Software development on May 6, 2009 | 2 Comments »
We’ve all heard the games industry overtime horror stories. ea_spouse is still the most famous example but if you work in games, you’ll know more. I’ve heard of people that were forced to stay late every night because of a “nobody leaves until everybody’s finished” policy – with people challenging the policy losing their bonuses. [...]
Stupid evil cancerous liars, I hate you!
Posted in Software development on April 23, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Everyone knows singletons are bad, right? I mean, they’re stupid, they’re evil, they’re pathological liars, they cause cancer, this guy hates them, and they bring people down.
But in the rush to condemn, sometimes people lose precision. I can understand why, as the problems can be infuriating, but it’s important to be precise about exactly what [...]
The trouble with state
Posted in Software development on April 16, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Today’s post is a slightly random collection of stories and observations, all tied together under the common theme of “state” in programming. I feel that just in the last year or so, I’ve come to understand this better as an abstract concept in its own right. I feel that it’s helped me to connect a [...]
A rule of thumb and a silver bullet
Posted in Software development on January 22, 2009 | 5 Comments »
Making good design decisions (in the software engineering sense) is tricky. In theory, you can boil everything down to first principles and make a decision based in pure logic. But in practice, this tends not to happen very much outside of textbooks. Real projects are just too complex and messy. And many design principles exist [...]
Don’t repeat yourself
Posted in Software development on December 30, 2008 | 4 Comments »
In the last few weeks of 2008 I spent a bit of time converting Jonathan Shewchuk’s adaptive floating-point predicates (included in his Triangle library) into C#. I don’t want to bash on this too much: the algorithms in question, and the technical proofs behind them, are wonderful things. The implementation is rock solid, providing a [...]
Fraternising with the Dark Side
Posted in Management, Software development on December 10, 2008 | 3 Comments »
I just stumbled upon this in the Scrum development newsgroup:
On the Scrum Trainers Yahoo site, this was posted in reference to Halliwell’s blog by a trainer who trained Halliwell in Scrum. I removed the trainers’ (last) names (by the way, Halliwell did soften his rhetoric in a followup blog entry):
Interesting. Paul and I [presented] a [...]
Development without a name
Posted in Management for Geeks, Software development on November 26, 2008 | 1 Comment »
After the rant, it’s time to be constructive. I was pleasantly surprised last time round by the comments: while I may have vented more strongly than some would have liked, there’s a clear dissatisfaction with capital-A Agile in many quarters, and a definite perception from many that it’s had its day. Over time, management fads [...]
The Agile Disease
Posted in Game development, Management for Geeks, Rants, Software development on November 16, 2008 | 68 Comments »
The games industry is rushing headlong to Agile development methodologies just now; it’s a great source of excitement for some, with conference sessions and magazine articles left, right and centre, and “evangelists” spreading the word.
I’m sick of it. I can’t wait for the day when everyone realises how much of a fad-diet, religious-cult-inspired, money-making exercise [...]
