Monthly Archives: February 2024

Floating point numbers aren’t weird

Posted on 2024-02-20 by Graham

When people say “floating point numbers are weird”, they typically mean that the IEEE 754 floating point representation for numbers doesn’t meet their needs, or maybe that it meets their needs but it is surprising in its behaviour because it … Continue reading →

Posted in software-engineering | Leave a comment

Still no silver bullet?

Posted on 2024-02-03 by Graham

In his 1986 article No Silver Bullet—Essence and Accident in Software Engineering, Fred Brooks suggests that there’ll never be a single tool, technique, or fad that realises an order-of-magnitude improvement in software engineering productivity. His reason is simple: if there … Continue reading →

Posted in design, software-engineering | 3 Comments

On whiteboard coding

Posted on 2024-02-01 by Graham

Another day in which someone lamented to me the demeaning nature of the interview coding challenge. It is indeed embarrassing, when someone with more than two decades of software engineering experience is asked to complete a gotcha-style programming task under … Continue reading →

Posted in whatevs | Leave a comment