By J. Timothy King on April 20, 2009
(This is a continuation from part 1 of “Depression and the Software Developer”.) If one of the most powerful weapons against depression is hope, one of its most powerful fuels is hopelessness. I attacked my next job with gusto and enthusiasm. The company had previously outsourced a project to an offshore contractor, and now that […]
Posted in Confessions of a Veteran Software Developer, Personal Improvement, Software Development, Stories, True Stories | Tagged biography, depression, programming, SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder, Software Development, software engineering, stress |
By J. Timothy King on April 17, 2009
Knowing what I know now, I wonder how I avoided depression for as long as I did: Stress causes depression. Perfectionists are more prone to depression. Isolation reinforces depression. As a software developer, those frequently go along with the job description. Seasonal Affective Disorder has gotten the rap for at least some of the funk, […]
Posted in Confessions of a Veteran Software Developer, Personal Improvement, Software Development, Stories, True Stories | Tagged biography, depression, programming, SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder, Software Development, software engineering, stress |
By J. Timothy King on March 24, 2009
Software developers have a wonderful explanation for why there are so, so many software bugs. Unfortunately, it’s a highly technical explanation that’s very difficult for the layman to understand. I’ll try to summarize, but be aware that the following is a gross oversimplification. The root problem is that software is complex. And it’s not just […]
Posted in Confessions of a Veteran Software Developer, Software Development, Stories, True Stories | Tagged bugs, programming, quality assurance, software engineering, testing, unit tests
By J. Timothy King on March 21, 2009
One way to deal with poor communication on a software project is simply to ignore the people around you and do what you wanted to do anyhow. Of course, this strategy can backfire, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing. But in that case, you probably won’t know enough to notice it backfiring, so […]
Posted in Confessions of a Veteran Software Developer, Humor, Software Development, Stories, True Stories | Tagged communication, Damon/IEC, innovation, programming, software engineering
By J. Timothy King on February 7, 2009
I ran across the video below at the SDLC blog: “Hug a developer… They’re in terrible pain.” This came at an significant time for me, because I too have been working on a project that is quite painful for me. It’s painful, because I saw the disaster coming, because I warned about it, because I […]
Posted in Leaving Normal, Software Development, Stories, True Stories | Tagged consulting, programming, software engineering
By J. Timothy King on January 16, 2009
From NETTUTS, a humorous summary of 10 bizarre programming languages, namely: Ook! Piet Whitespace LOLCODE Shakespeare Befunge reMorse FALSE Whenever l33t The conclusion one draws from this list is unmistakable and undeniable: There are programmers in the world who have far too much free time on their hands! -TimK
Posted in Humor, Software Development | Tagged programming, programming languages