Scott McNealy and Scott Hanselman have both said that open source software is free like a puppy, but a lot of open source software is free like a mature housebroken dog you get from a friendly neighbour. Building software, on the other hand, is like buying a puppy. A really young puppy that’s not housebroken. [...]

For much of the last decade I have received varying amounts of grief from colleagues for being so invested in Microsoft development technologies. For a professional demographic that prides itself on a mastery of logic, developer attitudes toward Microsoft can be downright bizarre. They are regularly inconsistent and frequently irrational. Developers can be almost religiously [...]

Are you done yet? Such a simple question… Earlier in my career I worked on a project that went into production with what I would consider a less than optimal set of internal admin tools. We deployed it and handed it over to the client’s internal team where it stayed live but untouched. After a [...]

Last week I got to spend an evening reinstalling my wife’s laptop because she picked up some malware.  She received an email from a friend with a link to a YouTube video that prompted her to install a new codec. Except the codec wasn’t really a codec. The link wasn’t really to YouTube. The email [...]

The term "computer science" is a laughable misnomer.  Outside of universities and operating system development, there isn’t a lot of computer science involved in the daily grind of computer programming.  There’s some, of course, but not enough that I would call myself a computer scientist.  Not by a long shot. I’ve long thought that Donald [...]