Andrew Wulf

Your Customers Don't Care About What's Wrong With Your Technology

Imagine you offer a service to the public over the Internet. Users push a button on a website to get or start whatever you want them to eventually pay for. It takes 10 seconds or more before anything comes back. Frustrated with you they go to a competitor and they

Is Technology Getting Too Complicated For Security To Keep Up?

I've always wondered if there will come a time when our interconnected world becomes so complex it turns sentient. Oh wait, that's a movie plot. I meant to say that things get so complex that we can't figure out how to keep them secure

Why I Don't Do Unpaid Overtime and Neither Should You

As a programmer in the U.S. for 30 years now I have spent some of that time working more than 40 hours in a week, which is not all that common in this industry, and when I was salaried I rarely if ever got more pay. No more, I

How Much Work Space Is Necessary For a Programmer?

The contract I just started is at a recognizable (at least the part I work at) company housed in a large campus setting. Yet everyone is packed in like sardines. The parking facilities cannot even support all the people who work there yet they have no plans to build anything

Fixing a Nasty Physically Modeled Engine Bug in an FPS Game

The game company I worked for until recently has a Mac/PC FPS wargame MMO which features myriads of physically modeled vehicles such as tanks, trucks, planes and boats. Running in every vehicle is a highly complex parameterized component model of the drive train (engine, torque converter, gearboxes, etc) complete

There Are No Absolutes in Programming

Lots of people have strong opinions about programming. Some people even have research to back up their opinions. Even more people know someone whose opinions about programming they believe. The internet is full of articles by people with opinions about programming. In the end however I don't think

The Two Sides of the Interview Process Dance

Being on the interviewed side of things currently I'm always amazed at how unprepared people are when they come to the interview. I've been there many times myself. I think there are many reasons and the one the most comes to mind is interview numbness. You

In the Real World Memorization is Overrated

I find it amusing reading stories of programmer interviews where the candidate is expected to know everything off the of their head. If you repeatly can't answer questions about programming syntax or parameters and the like but only answer "I usually look it up" you won&

10% Coding and 90% Thinking or Just Code It 10 Times

There seem to be two minds about how to write code: in one you spend most of your time planning and thinking about what you are going to code (thinking/coding), and in the other you code as quickly as possible and then start over or refactor several times until

In the Story of the Blind Men and the Elephant, I Guess I'm the One With The Trunk

Everything I have ever done as a programmmer has been things I knew little or nothing about when I started, yet I've always been able to master them and deliver great software. But after 30 years of this I find it incredibly difficult to be hired to do

There is No Silver Bullet In Software Development

In my 30 years of programming at or near the leading edge of software technology I've seen a ton of ideas, tools, languages, processes and methodologies appear that each claimed to be the ultimate solution for improving how software is written. Not one of them ever got beyond

Objects in the Job Description May Be Fuzzier Than They Appear

Look for a job in most places involves reading a lot of job descriptions. Once you get a job you usually find out that the description never matches the actual work. Even worse is reading a job description for your replacement - you wonder how you ever did all of

If You Interviewing Programmers Like This, You Are Doing It Wrong

The best job interviews I have ever been on have been simple chats between peers. Yet the trend today (especially in big companies) is more like 24 hours of hell. Give me a few minutes of prep time, a single hour at most, and I can tell you if a

Don't Tell Me Someone Failed Web Programming 101 Again

In this article a financial services company attacked someone who pointed out an obvious flaw in their url scheme by calling the police and then threatening to bill him for the fix. What was the problem? Apparently they put raw database id's into the url to identify the

I've Owned Almost Everything Steve Jobs Created, Sadly No More

I've owned or worked on Apple (and even some NeXT) products since I was a college student in 1979. It's almost unbelievable that one person had a hand in nearly all of them: Steve Jobs. It will be hard to imagine technology without his imagination, drive

QA! QA? We don't need no stinking QA!

After nearly 30 years as a professional programmer I am still truly astounded every time I see, hear, or experience a lack of understanding of the importance of QA in delivering products. Just two minutes ago I tried to create a new application in iTunes Connect (a new iOS gameI

What's My Motivation?

The stereotypical actor always wants to know this before performing a scene. Why am I doing this? Why is the character saying that? How did we get into this scene? The idea being that understanding what the character would be doing or saying in the real situation is helpful to

Is It Possible to Know Too Many Things?

I've always been adept at switching from one thing to another. A different platform, language, framework, technology, project type, whatever was needed. Often I have worked on different unrelated things at the same time. I've even fulfilled multple roles such as developer, architect, project manager and

Fighting the Good War - Against MMO Cheaters

Part of my job working for the MMO company is dealing with professional (and some amateur) game hackers. It's something every MMO company deals with. For some reason people are determined to play a different game than you designed and are willing to pay a lot of money

Does It Make Any Sense Today to Use Java for Web Applications?

I spent nine years as a Java architect/programmer through mid-2008 and was always a big proponent of the Java ecosysm; today though I wonder if the use cases for building web application in Java simply aren't there any more. In the earliest days of J2EE I worked

I Am a Programmer

* I am a programmer, not a coder, not a software engineer, not a warm body. * I am not a Java programmer, a C++ programmer, a PHP programmer, a Web programmer, a game programmer; I am all of these but still just a programmer. * My first full program was a simple

Why Do You Love Programming?

I'm not asking why you work as a programmer, but wether you have a passion for the act of programming. I think of programming the same way an artist thinks of painting or a musician thinks of music, it's not simply a means to an end,

The Future Of Programming Is

Not what you think it will be. I read some article on Reddit (actually the comments) where some guest lecturer spoke to a group and suggested that the future of programming is domain specific languages, and that they should focus on this. Today when people tell me what the future

What Do You Tell People You Are And What You Do

If you are a brain surgeon, everyone knows what you are and what you do, but as a programmer it's confusing to tell non-programmers what you are and what you do. First, what are we? Programmers, coders, developers, or software engineers? How about more exotic descriptions like software

I Am A Better Programmer Than You

Now that I have your blood boiling, the real point of the post is wondering how do you compare the skills and abilities of programmers? Whether they work with you, for you, or are prospective folks, trying to figure out who is better is a real pickle. It's