Wow. A lot of debate on quality versus velocity. I'm wondering if we're all on the same page with what we mean by quality.

In most commercial projects, "code quality" doesn't matter because code is seldom the end-product of the development effort - it's the binary that we ultimately ship. Total product quality matters, and process and skill weigh more than code quality in determining overall product quality.

I've just spent a few days hunting for a memory leak in M2Crypto, without success. Are there better options for interfacing to OpenSSL from Python? A small rant.

Writing mediocre code may help you move fast in the short term, but it can slow you down in the long term. A good architecture can help you move fast in the long term, but slows you down in the short term. How is a developer to decide how good is good enough?

For exploring complex software development ideas then a more effective way is to leverage more of the senses. John Udell in fact has come up with a preliminary list of "Screencast Guidelines". I've stumbled upon a couple more screencasts to justify the existence of a trend.

SOAP is comatose, but hasn't declared legally dead by either IBM or Microsoft. But how did this all happen? Isn't SOAP the underpinnings of Web Services, the same technology that was billed as the silver bullet to extinguish our collective integration nightmare? Well the time of reckoning has now arrived.

So what's up in the world of Diggins.

The source of the Boost C++ library version 1.32.0 as html with coloured source is now posted at http://www.ootl.org

Testing code is different from testing a system. Code in real-world, production systems has to contend with an ever changing, often unpredictable environment that renders unit tests an unreliable predictor of system behavior. In the real world, system robustness matters, but writing more tests can produce diminishing returns.

To what extent does the mindset encouraged by a language and its surrounding culture influence people's perceived productivity when they use that language? In this weblog post, I take a look at this question in the context of the static versus dynamic typing debate.

I have just finished a prototype interpreter for Unimperative, a functional programming language which happens to be also valid C++.

Can you divide your logical layers into separate deployable units without changing a single line of code? You should be able to!

Software development involves constantly making return on investment decisions. Investing extra time to achieve higher quality software can yield dividends far into the future, or can cause you to miss a market window in the near term. How do you make the tradeoff between software quality and development speed?

Or, Security? We don't need no stinkin' security!

I am finishing up the remote LogManager monitoring facilities in my http://logman.jini.org project and I'd like to share some interesting details about the implemenation.