Byte Jar - Software Lessons Learned the Hard Way
A public service catalog of solutions to annoying software development problems, or
a sporadically updated rant chamber hosted by the code grunts of a tiny software company. Thanks for tuning in.
Way back in 'aught none (as my great-grandfather would say, though he meant 1900 and I mean 2000), a tiny little software company formed. That company was ideacode, whose mission was to turn novel ideas into novel code. (Hence the name.)
The original ideacoders came to the table with a lot of knowledge, but since then have learned exponentially more. It's gone critical, as they say, and there's just not enough room in our heads any more.
We -- gasp -- had to start writing things down.
Turns out, writing things down wasn't so bad. Besides having a lot more room in our heads, we found that committing our ideas to paper and sharing them made us explosively more productive. See, before paper we'd miss things: those little, mundane details that the knower knew but didn't relate because it was innate. Writing things down forced us to examine our habits and to document all the steps.
Error rates went down and productivity went up. Writing things down stopped us from being bitten by the byte, our cute little expression for when software does exactly what it was told, but not what you wanted.
These columns collect some of our frustrations and our solutions into a nice, little place: a byte jar. We hope you find them helpful. And, of course, YMMV and TIMTOWTDI.