Komodo IDE version 6 radically changed the design of one of the key aspects of what makes it an IDE, not just an editor - Projects. There have been a lot of unhappy comments from the user community. How much consultation should a company provide?

Your HR department may be very proud of their career planning publications but does the organisation actually benefit from forcing developers to consider their career?

Can a focus on C++ get me through the next twenty-odd years? Is it time to stop chasing bright, shiny new languages and consolidate as a guru? A few thoughts on "legacy languages" and the later stages of a coding career.

Trying to do some simple file processing and strip blank lines, Andy stumbles through the "Ruby is supposed to feel natural" approach and just tries things. The conclusion - Python list comprehensions are still more flexible and powerful than any Ruby feature and inject is possibly the most misleadingly named function I've ever encountered.

Inspired by the Adventures of a Pythonista in Schemeland series and being engaged in my own learning experience, here's the start of a series by a language geek with about 18 years of OO development experience, trying to get to the heart of Ruby.

A large body of unit tests as a regression test system is important to many organizations. What do you do when your framework of choice dies or is neglected? When is it time to move on and how do you budget for abandoning or rewriting tests? Have you ever thought about being caught by this situation?

An attempt to answer the question - given 1 million lines of code in the repository (i.e. SVN), is there some rule of thumb as to the number of developers we have to keep on staff just to maintain those 1 million lines of code?

Ruby is the cool new kid of on the block and has some significant cred in code-generation circles. Python has whitespace sensitivities that make it a poorer fit for templating solutions. This sounds like a no-brainer decision but is the real argument about which language the market wants to see used?

A shower song to remind me why it's useful to write down alternatives and reasoning.

Would you hire a programmer who insisted on working things out or using APIs solely from memory? If we expect people to be able to quickly research things on the web as part of the programming, why not include that in interviews? Is search efficiency a skill that should be on your resume?

Everything I'm doing seems to be about small chunks of thought. These chunks need tracking, comparing, versions controlling and melding into presentations of varying narrative richness. The interesting projects and interested parties include software engineers, publishers and academics but there's no killer app in sight?

In which Andy suffers an extreme bout of cynical disbelief in the merits of Resource Oriented Architecture and "solving" the discovery problem by giving up and just having a description as part of a "Resource".

How do you develop a Roadmap for a broad-ranging community, encompassing several service-oriented architectures? Here are some ideas.

How do you transfer knowledge about a system in an optimal way, without forever being the 'guy who knows'? What practices will help you exit gracefully? Or, even if you aren't leaving this area of the project, how do you lessen the documentation burden?

There are two kinds of software experience you want for your end users - Invisibility and Smile on My Face.