Code Ownership

I can't praise code ownership enough. Do you know some code that is unowned? If so, I bet you also know code that is unloved. What sorts of benefits does code ownership bring?

Owning code promotes pride and responsibility. Owning code, especially over a long period of time, allows us to become known for quality work. Even more important, we get to see the results of both good and bad design decisions. From mistakes, we improve our skills.

If you flop around from project to project, submit code and never maintain it, you'll never get to see any of this. You'll think you're a better programmer than you are.

Steve

SWT Speak (Part 2)

Here are some more SWT technical terms for you. Use them and abuse them!

cake - code that is unnecessarily complex, multi-layered, and full of indirection. "The cake clouds everything. Impossible to see the code is."

pinhead - a very small widget. "Where is the stupid thing? Oh, it's a pinhead."

fly shit - small graphical output. "Of course you can't read it, you chose the fly shit font!"

Steve

SWT Speak (Part 1)

There are lots of technical terms the SWT committers use without thinking, assuming that the rest of the world understands. So, if you enter a bug report against Platform SWT, you're cool if you use any of these:

cheese - pixel corruption. "I just clicked and look, cheese everywhere, all over the screen!"

new and improved - a bug was introduced. "The extra mouse up event is new and improved for 3.2."

spew - debugging messages to a console. "Run the example, observe all the GTK spew when you click on the button. Yikes!"

wad - lots of code. "Just cut, paste and exec the wad."

Steve

Hello from WWDC!

I'm here at WWDC (Apple's World Wide Developer Conference) in California. Right now, I'm listening to Steve Jobs and he's not jumping around the room screaming, "Developers, developers, developers ...". Instead, we're seeing great demos. As I look around, I see true believers. Heck, if you cut these guys, they'd bleed rainbow.

The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that Apple has worked hard to embrace Java. They ship Java as part of their operating system. No need to ask users to download a JVM or ship one with your product. Microsoft doesn't ship Java (they used to but they got sued -- now we have C#). Linux distributions don't ship Java (the licensing is wrong but Sun is fixing this).

Apple worked hard from the start to let people build real Java applications. They are the only guys I know who let you easily create double clickable applications that have the right icons and start just like native ones. They fixed Swing way back when to have the Macintosh look and feel. They run a version of the JVM that does the MVM (multiple virtual machine) thing that shares class files between processes and cuts down on memory usage.

Thanks guys for all the hard work!

Steve

We just keep fixin' em

The SWT committers just keep hammering away, making things better. Lots of major bugs are getting fixed and new features implemented, but no one makes a fuss. Code speaks louder than words, right? Let the "New and Noteworthy" do the talking. That's the SWT motto. Why do I have this blog then?

Some say a BLOG is a ...

B - loated
L - ying
O - verblown
G - lorification

Yikes! I feel "New and Not Worthy". Time to stop typing and go fix something. How about 138528?

Steve