Most of the design books you read, including my own, are about how to be a good, competent designer. They are about how to make strong, reasoned design decisions and about design methods and tools. But what they won’t—can’t—teach you is how to become a great designer.The only way to be a great designer is to produce great products. Everything else is…well, everything else. I’m convinced that the people who are great designers, while assuredly they’re both talented and experienced, have taken extra measures to ensure that what they produce...

It's deceptively easy to maintain traffic once you've scored that initial boost of visitor hits. In fact, one of the greatest determinations of this relies on a single make or break entry.Every blogger knows, if they look at their web analytics at all, that one of the most consistently viewed pages is the biographical entry. If it's linked on the home page or throughout the blog, the audience will invariably stay long enough to read it, at least 25% of the time if the initial trafficing content is good.Users want to satisfy their cusiosity. If what they read...

1. The Mature ProgrammerThe mature programmer manages their own time and productivity well. The MP knows that maintenance is as much work as the initial writingand code always takes longer than you think. The MP knows that any changes to code can introduce bugs, no matter how seemingly trivial.The MP knows that premature optimization is foolish and dangerous. The MP knows that sexy coding like writing big complex systems fromscratch is rarely the best way to go. The MP does not get into ego competitions about who has the prettiest code. The MP acheives thebest final result in the minimum ...

I got a call from a friend of a friend the other night. It was a fellow with whom I’d talked 11 months ago about a project he and his partner were looking to start. We established then that I wasn’t the guy for him, that I was likely too expensive for their big-dreams, small-means budget.Fast forward to present day: their project is still not launched, it’s still not right. They’ve paid for something between 600-700 hours of development with a firm in India, and they should have launched 6 weeks ago.Sure they’re only being charged $14/hour for that work, but ...

I got a call from a friend of a friend the other night. It was a fellow with whom I’d talked 11 months ago about a project he and his partner were looking to start. We established then that I wasn’t the guy for him, that I was likely too expensive for their big-dreams, small-means budget.Fast forward to present day: their project is still not launched, it’s still not right. They’ve paid for something between 600-700 hours of development with a firm in India, and they should have launched 6 weeks ago.Sure they’re only being charged $14/hour for that work, but ...

I got a call from a friend of a friend the other night. It was a fellow with whom I’d talked 11 months ago about a project he and his partner were looking to start. We established then that I wasn’t the guy for him, that I was likely too expensive for their big-dreams, small-means budget.Fast forward to present day: their project is still not launched, it’s still not right. They’ve paid for something between 600-700 hours of development with a firm in India, and they should have launched 6 weeks ago.Sure they’re only being charged $14/hour for that work, but ...

My last post outlined some of the possibilities for integer semantics in programming languages, and asked which option was correct. This post contains my answers. Just to be clear: I want practical solutions, but I’m not very interested by historical issues or backwards compatibility with any existing language, and particularly not with C and C++.We’ll start with:Premise 1: Operations on default integer types return the mathematically correct result or else trap.This is the same premise that as-if infinitely ranged begins with, but we’ll perhaps end up with some different ...

How do you track and decide what topics you want to spend time learning?For a while, I didn’t have a real good solution. Something would trigger me to remember “Oh yeah! I really wanted to learn more about that”. I would spend the evening doing busy learning - it seemed like I was learning but I really wasn’t.Instead of trying to do Deliberate Practice, I’d fool myself into thinking I was investing my time wisely by reading blog posts and examples but not actually doing much of anything.Soon, the enthusiasm would pass and my progress would stale. Rinse and repe...