So you're new to Sun, or you're new to Solaris. Maybe you have lots of experience developing mission-critical software, maybe you have none. But if you haven't already figured it out, we take quality very seriously around here. Developing Solaris is very hard, and it's very important. This is good news, not bad news -- solving easy problems is boring and solving irrelevant problems is, well, irrelevant. But you should be prepared that you will need to push yourself to deliver highest quality software.

When writing code that will be used by others (and we do that 100% of the time, even if the other user is ourselves in a few weeks time), there’s a tricky balance to strike between being generous to the users of our code, and ensuring that they get the information they want to ensure they’re calling our code correctly. There are two coding maxims: “Be generous on input, and strict on output”, and “fail fast”, which we need to hold in tension. This post explores the trade-offs between the two.

The software we write is divided into parts: modules, classes, functions, variables. As we write each part, we must name it. This article takes concepts from linguistics, in particular from first and second language learning, and relates them to our everyday use of language in code.

The following list outlines the practices that I use in all code that I am the original author of; contributions to projects that I have created should follow these guidelines.

To begin, password storage 101: servers don’t usually store actual passwords. Instead, they hash the password, store the hash, and discard the password. The hash can verify a password from a login page, but can’t be reversed back to the text of the password. So when you inevitably lose your SQL password table, you haven’t exposed all the passwords; just the crappy ones.

Hello, world! Today we're going to hear the story of Evil King Java and his quest for worldwide verb stamp-outage.1

One of the first systems our engineers built in AWS is called the Chaos Monkey. The Chaos Monkey’s job is to randomly kill instances and services within our architecture. If we aren’t constantly testing our ability to succeed despite failure, then it isn’t likely to work when it matters most – in the event of an unexpected outage.

The short story is that pair programming doesn’t work for me as the main way of developing software.  I can pair program for a day, or maybe a week, especially if we’re focused on a particular problem.  But after that?  I’m done.  Toast.  I don’t want to see anyone, talk to anyone, and I need at least a couple of days in a cave until I’m fit for human company again. 

What's your favourite quote about programming?

A selection of free, printable quick references for a variety of languages and web technologies.

A common problem programming problem: identify the URLs in an arbitrary string of text, where by “arbitrary” let’s agree we mean something unstructured such as an email message or a tweet. I offer a solution, in the form of the following regex pattern:

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Modifier keys for plist shortcut editing.