Author Archive

Must read books for every developer

A few years back, I got suck into a conversation of my colleagues on book reading and it surprised me. And not in a good way. In a conversation of six, four of them didn’t read books (apparently due to lack of time) and one read only popular Sci-fi and fantasy books. The remaining one […]

Issue tracking for beginners

I first met Trac several years ago at my previous gig for a cloud project we were developing at that point. Prior to that, we used some in-house support tool developed in Lotus Notes. Prior to that, I used Notepad. And let me tell you, everything you use for issue tracking is fine, as long […]

Crunch-time development

Remember the last time your boss roamed into your office/cubicle and asked you to add this one tiny feature to your project in a week? You were tempted to say it is not possible to do it in the time frame, but then you took into account that it looks and sounds as a small […]

Priorities

To be honest, I have been meaning to write this post for years now, but never got around doing it. It took a recent incident (yes, let’s call it that) to remind me of this topic. You know, priorities are funny. We are taught about priorities since our birth, yet, when we reach adult age, […]

Quick tip: Compile and deploy web application from command line (or script)

Sooner or later, your .NET web application project will gather helping hands and it is at that point that you will realize that deployment from Visual Studio is just not good enough. Yes, I know Microsoft did a grand job with their deployment scheme in Visual Studio, but let’s be honest. That only works if […]

Creating transparent CStatic control in MFC

For a side project, I am working on in my spare time since college, I needed to create a splash screen. Finally. Eleven years after version 1.0 and we are thinking splash screen. Anyway, the splash screen must contain a custom image as a background, a progress bar to display how the initialization is progressing […]

Absolute positioning = evil?

When I started to learn how to develop web pages, CSS was in it’s beginnings. It was in state that CSS3 was two years ago where each browser interpreted it in it’s own way and half of the stuff didn’t work in one of available browsers. This meant that unless you had a huge desire […]

I hate copy & paste coders

Software development is somewhat specific field. All you need to create an application is a computer, text editor, a compiler and some spare time and you are ready to go. And if you are developing in script language, you don’t even need a compiler. Hence, anybody with some spare time on their hands and an […]

The Great Expectations

When I was in high school, I preferred spending time programming than studying oh, let’s say geography. Even if I wasn’t programming or (let’s be frank) playing games, I still found numerous things I could do that were not studying. I even washed dishes after lunch. This of course resulted in not so stellar grades […]

Take a deep breath and think

I started working at age of 19. At that point, my solution to a given task was to jump and code. Mostly because that was all I knew how to do. Partly, because I never had problems with writing loads of code fast. However, whenever I seemed to be near the solution of a given […]