For the last ten years, if you had asked, I would have told you with some conviction that a “critical path” is a kind of test script that tests the essential functionality of a system. If the app passes it’s critical path test, I would have said, it may not delight users, but it’s unlikely that they’ll storm your basement with torches and pitchforks. It came up at work during a discussion about in...

I’ve taken a big step in my career. I’ve become a software consultant. The decision to leave my job of three and a half years wasn’t an easy one. I was working with some fantastic people, building the best software we could, but at the end of the day I wasn’t learning. The work was challenging, but the challenges were mostly non-technical. In this business, if you’re not moving forward you may as ...

I was conducting technical interviews recently for a senior developer position. I like to talk about a bunch of things, but there is one question I particularly enjoy asking each candidate. Write an implementation for this: 1234int Average(int a, int b){} It’s a great question because it’s a simple problem, and anyone that comes through the door should know the formula without having to...

We did one of our monthly releases at work this week. Releases can be stressful and frustrating, and take a lot of methodical preparation to get right. It can be thankless work too; the only time a user notices a release is when it goes badly. We do our releases early on a week day to minimize impact, so if anything does go wrong, there’s not many bodies around to help out. It’s not much fun, but ...

I’m working on the code that parses VCalendar data so that it can be processed. I’m copying the data I care about into a simple data structure that can represent a calendar request in any format. Any logic that interacts with calendar requests would use this internal structure. I want it to be simple, only having the stuff that I need, but I don’t want to completely re-invent the wheel either, so ...

My company runs a 24/7 site with a substantial number of users and connections to partner systems all over the world. We do what we can to make the system fault tolerant, but problems can still appear at any time of day or night. Ideally we would have a technical support team that’s staffed around the clock, but that not in the cards for now. We used to have a system where anyone that could f...

My next goal for the Themis project is to parse an invitation from an email. I am starting with invitations generated by MS Outlook because that’s my target audience, but a peak inside of a Google Calendar invitation gives me hope that I’ll be able to support multiple calendars without much trouble. Outlook invitations are sent in the VCalendar format, content type “text/calendar”. The standa...

I found my first 64-bit bug at work. I was moving a windows service built for the ‘Any CPU’ to a 64-bit server. It started fine on the new server, and gave no indication of poor health in the logs, but one key function was malfunctioning. I’m not exactly sure what the cause is, but I know that the hash of any binary file was resulting in the same value. The service does some direct memory manipula...

My wife and I have been taking a Japanese class. I’m enjoying it quite a bit, even though learning languages has never been easy for me. I need to work hard to memorize all the new words, and that means lots and lots of practice. My wife bought a pack of index cards. This is what a normal person would do. To me, it seems like defeat. Why use paper when there’s a computer in the room? While she’s a...

I decided to give IE9 a try. What’s not to like about a browser that’s supposed to be faster, cleaner, and support new HTML features? They really nailed the faster and cleaner parts. I didn’t find the user interface in IE8 too busy, but seeing the improvement I’m happy for the extra space. Plunking a site onto my task bar like it were an application is pretty awesome. There are a couple of website...