In the Summer and Fall of 1999, at the peak of the dot-com boom, there was incredible competition for software developers. Starting pay for developers with no experience had already climbed to \\(60K and then, in the course of maybe 3 months, it went from \\)60K to \\(75K to \\)90K …

I'm trying to hire a couple developers. One guy sent a resume that looked great -- degree in CS, C++ experience, a year with Ruby in Rails. So I sent him a simple programming exercise. I sent him the testcases.

He shoots back an answer. I open a command-line, type ruby …

She was a good dog.

I recently wrote an encomium to ResolverOne, the IronPython-based spreadsheet:

[T]heir use of pair programming and test-driven development has delivered high productivity; of the 140,000 lines of code, 110,000 are tests....ResolverOne has been in development for roughly two years, is written in a language without explicit …

https://portal.acm.org/poplogin.cfm? .... etc ... (I can't post the whole URL since it's linked to my account)

It's been quite a year for Python, and Google App Engine provides the dynamic language a very high profile indeed. GAE is a cloud platform that is competitive with Amazon's S3 (much like Stratos, on the planet Ardana might compete with Cloud City on Bespin ). GAE provides Django and other …

Sometime after Space War and Asteroids, but before color was widespread in arcade games, there was a 2-person vector-graphics game in which you and your friend drove "tractors" around and grabbed little diamonds (or whatever) from a pile in the center of the screen and dragged them back to your …

"I wrote an encryption algorithm with 612 bits of security." (I really like to imagine the 'notes' from the studio on this -- "I like how this establishes that Hansen is a very talented programmer, but let's bump it up 100 to show he was really good.")

"We need Linux servers …

From Miguel de Icaza comes word of Igor Moochnick's open source implementation of Powershell, the excellent (if frustratingly verbose in its default configuration) shell from Microsoft

Hmm.... this post advocating Collective Code Ownership as "the most important principle of XP" has a link to my comment on "bad programmers are not good programmers who are slow"

The implication is that either:

1. Counter-productive programmers are a myth and a scapegoat at all times, or
2. CCO is a …