Getting Started With Existing Code

Software developers often have to work with existing code bases, whether it’s for joining an ongoing development effort or for maintenance work on a legacy application. Getting familiar with foreign code takes time and can be a frustrating experience. In this article I’m going to describe my strategies for getting up to speed quickly. [...]

(No) Comment?!

Many software developers feel bad because they make little use of comments in their code. Often, using lengthy comments is considered good style. In the old days, with languages like C or assembler, things got messy pretty fast, so comments were the only way to keep track of processor registers or pointer arithmetic. In modern [...]

Good API Design

Recently I discovered an interesting video for all of us aspiring software architects on Google Video. As part of the “Google Tech Talks” series, Joshua Bloch talks about “How to Design a Good API and Why it Matters”. Being one of the main architects of Java (among others, he designed the Collections framework), Bloch undoubtedly [...]

Release Management in Open Source Projects

During my work in open source projects, I observed several ways of dealing with software releases, ranging from chaos up to well-defined release processes.
In this article, I’m going to describe two common patterns of dealing with releases from a technical perspective. This article has been written with subversion in mind, but applies to other revision [...]