Good software trumps elaborate code. And unfortunately, you can’t usually have both. The real world has deadlines and ship dates. It’s a game of pick two:Ship on timeShip with elaborate codeShip with a fantastic productAlmost always, you should pick the first and the last when you’re building software applications for users (if you’re building API’s or open source libraries for other developers, then it’s a different story). Too often I have seen developers, when struck with a brilliant idea, no matter how small, plunk away at building an elaborat...

With the releasing of the Lockless Memory Allocator under the GPL version 3.0 license, we can now discuss more of the optimization tricks used inside it. Many of these are things you wouldn't want to use in normal code. However, when speed is the ultimate goal, sometimes we need to break a few rules and use code that is a little sneaky.The SlabA slab is a well-known technique for allocating fixed size objects. For a given object size, a chunk of memory is divided up into smaller regions of that length. Since all the interior objects have the same size, fragmentation is eliminated. The only rea...

I had tried to register for Elite yesterday, and the servers were being funny, so I wasn't sure if I'd registered. I just now tried to reset my password, and I got the following:Hello JoshForgot your password? These things happen. Access your account with the password below:{Actual Unencrypted Password}Really? They're storing hundreds of thousands of passwords in plain text??EDIT: Not sure what the downvotes are for, surely it's not because huge companies like Steam and Sony never get hacked, and their user base leaked...Further EDIT: Perhaps I seemed too snarky, and I apologize for that. The ...

Earlier today, my colleague Matt Burns wrote a post noting that most tablet makers may be largely failing because they’ve sold their soul to Android and are now just in the middle of a spec war, which no one can win. I’m gonna go one step further in that line of thinking: the spec is dead.There have been a few key stories from the past couple of weeks that highlight this new reality. Barnes & Noble unveiled the new Nook Tablet. Consumer Reports looked at the iPhone 4S. Andthe first reviews came in about the Kindle Fire.On paper, the Nook Tablet is the...

It's the shooter season of the year and this fall was all about Modern Warfare 3 versus Battlefield 3. And being the kind of game they are they also try to keep their audience playing by introducing some additional level of engagement. Both Call of Duty and Battlefield introduced their own online community websites and statistic platforms. Call of Duty has Elite, Battlefield has Battelog.But just because these services are sitting in the same spot it does not mean they are in any way similar. And that actually goes for more than just their monetization plans and feature sets. Elite is a tradit...

The debate over whether supporting the Adobe Flash plug-in on mobile devices is a feature or not is over. Last night, ZDNet got hold of a leaked Adobe announcement: It’s abandoning its work on Flash for mobile. It’s not a huge surprise that it came to this, since Adobe had been struggling to optimize the performance, and the tide has been turning toward HTML5.From the Adobe announcement ZDNet published:Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer...

In preparation for a recent team offsite, I spent some time thinking about what I hold dear as a software developer. One idea I kept coming back to is the notion of balance. I see balance manifesting itself several ways in the work of a successful developer, some of which follow.Speed Versus QualityThe most obvious example is the balance of development speed and quality. When building software, it’s never a good idea to write code as fast as possible without any attention toward maintainability, just as it’s never a good idea to spend such an inordinate amount of time designing a...

The problem with shit work is that no one likes doing it, but an awful lot of people say they do.Shit workTake a look at Twitter Lists. The idea behind Twitter Lists was that users would carefully cultivate lists on Twitter of different accounts they’re following (or not following). These could be divided into lists like Family, Friends, Coworkers, People I Find Mildly Attractive, People To Murder, People I Find Mildly Attractive And Want To Murder, and so on.The problem is that, anecdotally, no one seems to use Lists. Twitter is filled with users who have carefully made a few lists, an...