Homepage Glossary IT What is Wirth’s Law? What is Wirth’s Law? A short definition of Wirth’s Law Wirth’s Law is a well-known saying in computer programming that states, “Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.” That creates … Read more
For much of the 21st century, software engineering has been seen as one of the safest havens in the tenuous and ever-changing American job market. But there are a growing number of signs that the field is starting to become … Read more
Back then, when I was a kid, I got a computer with MS-DOS that could run Windows 95. The machine only got 800 MB of Hard Disk. I don’t know how much RAM it got – in fact, I didn’t … Read more
Sinking of the RMS Titanic 1. A lack of emergency preparations had left Titanic’s passengers and crew in “a state of absolute unpreparedness” 2. Safety compromising ambition. In a quest to complete the journey sooner, ship traveled at high speeds … Read more
Software Engineering at Google Foreword Preface Programming Over Time Google’s Perspective What This Book Isn’t Parting Remarks Conventions Used in This Book O’Reilly Online Learning How to Contact Us Acknowledgments Thesis What Is Software Engineering? Time and Change Hyrum’s Law … Read more
Copyright 2023 by Jon “maddog” HallLicensed under Creative Commons BY-SA-NDPhoto: © Santiago Ferrita Litowtschenko Several people have opined on the recent announcement of Red Hat to change their terms of sales for their software. Here are some thoughts from someone … Read more
2019-04-15 Anyone who built software for a while knows that estimating how long something is going to take is hard. It’s hard to come up with an unbiased estimate of how long something will take, when fundamentally the work in … Read more
This is the best-kept secret of the software engineering profession: engineers hate code. Especially code written by other people. It’s why they love working on greenfield projects so much. No code, no maintenance, no headaches! Ever wondered why microservices took … Read more
For over a year I have used a Google-free smart phone, at first with just LineageOS and later with LineageOS+MicroG. It was a nice experiment but my phone was causing too much trouble and in the end I got fed … Read more
Effort estimation is an important component of any project, software or otherwise. While effort estimation is something that everybody in industry is involved with on a regular basis, it is a niche topic in software engineering research. The problem is … Read more