Tools of the Trade

When we maintain existing code, we must be very careful to avoid breaking or degrading the system we're working on.

Managing and controlling a service's provision is tricky, but tools for service orchestration, like Rundeck, can make our lives…

Many affordable cloud-based offerings that cover software development needs, like version control, issue tracking, remote application monitoring,…

Infrastructure developed within an organization for its own internal use can take many forms.

The environment in which we work as developers can make a tremendous difference on our productivity and well-being.

Finding yourself in a situation with a working and a buggy system is quite common.

Deciding whether to write portable code or not should be the outcome of a cost-benefit analysis.

Systems software is the low-level infrastructure that applications run on.

On 25 October 2012, at ACM's SPLASH conference, six practitioners and academics came together for a panel discussion about…

A declarative programming style focuses on what you want your program to do rather than how to perform the task.

The choice between using the functionality of the application's platform Java EE or .NET, calling one of several available external libraries, or…

Modern virtualization technology allows us to run operating systems in a virtual machine that can be hosted on facilities ranging from our laptop to a…

An IT system's setup and configuration affects developers mainly due to the proliferation and complexity of Internet-facing systems.

Git is a distributed revision control system available on all mainstream development platforms through a free software license.

A package management system organizes and simplifies the installation and maintenance of software by standardizing and organizing the production…

Refactoring with ad hoc methods increases the scope of possible refactorings, allows you to use the same approaches on various languages, and…

Given the parallels between the complexity of human spaceflight and large software systems, there are many things we developers can learn from…

CPUs are no longer getting faster. Instead, CPU manufacturers now package multiple cores in each CPU and ask us developers to put them to good use.

Our growing ability to swiftly put together sophisticated software affords us the luxury to listen to our customers, to try out new things, to make mistakes,…

The developers of the SQLite open source database engine estimate that it's deployed in roughly half a billion systems around the world.

This paper presents a elytS edoC - a software used in writing source codes.

Sophisticated processing of huge, complex datasets requires us to rethink the relationship between disk-based storage and main-memory processing.

A standardized and widely used diagramming notation is a sign of a profession's maturity.

The basic principles of good code documentation include the avoidance of repetition, the coexistence of code and its…

Railroad tracks offer guidance and support.

Advice on courteousness and politeness in technical communication is in short supply, yet this is needed when developers communicate with other…

In this paper, job security in code design is discussed.

A drawing is often the best way to describe a large, complex artifact.

Any development project involves elements that we don't know at the beginning and discover as we progress.

Brian Kernighan looks back at what has and has not changed in computing, programming, and tools over the last 30 years.

Code lacking comments, meaningful identifiers, and correct indentation is a nightmare.

The tools and processes we use to transform our system's source code into an application that we can deploy or ship have always been important, but nowadays…

XML is an extremely nifty format. Computers can easily parse XML data, yet humans can also understand it.

Metaprogramming, using programs to manipulate other programs, is as old as programming.

This paper tries to devise an algorithm for analyzing initializers for C arrays and structures.

This paper presents similarities in data by expressing them as a new type.

What's the state of the art in the tools we use to build software To answer this question, I let a powerful server build from source code about…

What can developers do when faced with an aged software system This is where a silver bullet comes in handy.

The ultimate source of truth regarding a program is its execution.

The Unix system and its pipelines are a model of software reuse.

Open source software development efforts offer us professionals a new and valuable way to obtain significant experience in a wide range…

This paper evaluates the use of a functional language for implementing domain-specific functionality.

The testing, diagnostic, and repair equipment of many professions is horrendously expensive.

One way to deal with bugs is to avoid them entirely.

Nowadays, a software system's program source code makes up only a small part of its assets stored as bits - taking up a larger percentage are…

This is the second installment of a software engineering glossary of version control terminology.

Line-oriented textual data streams are the lowest useful common denominator for a lot of data that passes through our hands.

Sane programmers don't write production code without the help of an editor and an interpreter or a compiler, yet the author has seen many software projects…

This is the first installment of a software engineering glossary of version control terminology.

The author decided to create a tool to fit the needs.

In computing, we often solve a complex problem by adding another level of indirection.

In this article, we give some advices for the programmers for an efficient software design.