"in California, the Placer County Courthouse accidentally summoned 1,200 people to jury duty on the same morning. Taking their duty seriously, residents tried to be on time but the traffic jam was too much."

"In any highly skilled profession, 95% of the time someone with very little of your skill could do your job. The valuable part is that you can also be counted on for that 5% as well."

-Succintly put.

"At stage one, a software team is developing features. They are cutting corners but their debt is low, they’ve not made too many mistakes and they can pay for them with enthusiasm. At point two, what Collins calls an undisciplined pursuit of more, organisational and technical debt are growing, yet its exponential nature is not yet apparent. A common feature here is long hours and low automation - the company are sending men to do machine’s jobs - and older projects are biting you back. At stage three, just before technical and organisation debt explode, projects are painful to complete, blame looks like a management practice, fights occur between the responsible and irresponsible, run time errors are all over the place."

Erlang's programming rules that are good in the whole

Nice glimpse into how the spell-checker and context-aware portions of After the Deadline work.

There will always be things we wish to say in our programs that in all known languages can only be said poorly.

-- Alan Perlis

I've tested as an INTJ, so this was an interesting post.

Our results provide empirical evidence that the organizational metrics are related to, and are effective predictors of failure-proneness.

. MySQL's new development cycle and release strategies.

This has been around for a while but this is one of the best essays on computing science that I have ever read, and Dijkstra was the perfect candidate to write it.

Guide from Google employee about writing testable code.

List of most of the refactoring methods in Fowler's book.

1. Testing because you have to.
2. Testing to spot regressions.
3. Testing to see if your code works

"In reality, by the time an error has occurred, there are only two possible outcomes: either you expected the error to occur, in which case you have already written code to handle the failure, or you didn’t, in which case your main focus should be to use the error as a learning opportunity."

Solid advice and tips here.

David Lee Roth's vocal track for "Running with the Devil" ran through Songsmith.

This is pretty useful for keeping under the 140 character limit for Twitter in Pidgin

Looks interesting. Could be an approximation of Firebug for IE.

Fantastic post about how developers work vs manager types.

I write code. But why do I write code?