If anyone knows the joys and sorrows of managing software development projects, it would be Linus Torvalds, creator of the world's most popular open-source software program: the Linux operating system. For more than 20 years, Torvalds has been directing thousands of developers to improve the open source OS. He and I sat down to talk about effective techniques in running large-scale distributed programming teams – and the things that don’t work, too.Torvalds says there are two things that people very commonly get completely wrong, both at an individual developer level an...

Between love and madness lies HighScalability:Google now 10x better: MapReduce sorts 1 petabyte of data using 8000 computers in 33 minutes; 1 Billion on Social Networks;Tumblr at 10 Billion Posts; Twitter at 100 Million Users; Testing at Google Scale: 1800 builds, 120 million test suites, 60 million tests run daily.From the Dash Memo on Google's Plan: Go is a very promising systems-programming language in the vein of C++. We fully hope and expect that Go becomes the standard back-end language at Google over the next few years. On GAE Go can load fro...

What is “Fun?”“I’ll know it when I see it.”In 1964, in Jacobellis v. Ohio, the US Supreme Court needed to decide whether the state of Ohio could ban a film it called “obscene”—a concept people understood but were hard-pressed to define. Justice Potter Stewart, in his concurring opinion, wrote: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture in...

Over the past few years there has been an evolutionary shift in the world of software development.  Not very long ago, the dominant Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) methodology was the Waterfall Method with very specific phases that separated the construction phase from phases like design and test. The software development industry, still very new, was striving to find a repeatable, predictable process for developing software.  The best model for this seemed to be the physical sciences, like civil engineering and architecture. Artifacts like detailed requirements, design docume...

A few months ago I was visiting a client who was having a lot of problems using TDD.“It takes over half an hour to run our unit tests,” he said.“You are not doing TDD,” I said. “In order for tests to be valuable all of them must run fast—within a few seconds, or developers will stop running tests frequently.”“But how to I make them run fast?” he asked, “Just connecting to the database takes 30 seconds”So I showed him a technique called Dependency Injections that allowed him to insert a mock object instead of the database. â€...

Are you looking to set up an independent game development team?  You’ll need a team that covers all areas of game development including programming, art, design, sound, project management and business.  You need to pick the right people that can work together for months or even years.  Below are some tips for putting the right team together to increase your chances of success.RolesGame development involves a number of common roles as well as some overlooked ones.  Individual team members can handle multiple roles on smaller teams and some roles can be shared by more ...

This week, Hewlett-Packard (where I am on the board) announced that it is exploring jettisoning its struggling PC business in favor of investing more heavily in software, where it sees better potential for growth. Meanwhile, Google plans to buy up the cellphone handset maker Motorola Mobility. Both moves surprised the tech world. But both moves are also in line with a trend I've observed, one that makes me optimistic about the future growth of the American and world economies, despite the recent turmoil in the stock market.In short, software is eating the world.More than 10 years after the pea...

You have wanted to fix that module for ages. Just one look at it and you cringe. The documentation, the weird naming of functions, classes that are just plain weird. The module hobbeles along, but it is just plain dirty. The real programmer in you cringe, and when there finally is some time to refactor the module, you jump at it.Step 1 - Desperation So you start to have a real good look at what you need to. Fix a class here, rename a few functions there, tear out a few functions here. Simple, right? Well, what at first glance seemed like a simple fix, a few tweaks, now envisions itse...