Don’t Say Geek! Say Syntux!

Ok, WTF Or LoL?

Tags: coding standards, adobe photoshop

Paul asked What are you using machines for?

1. Syntux: my laptop, I use it for my day development work and surfing around, ubuntu Feisty is there.
2. Homey: various activities from gaming up to testing and developing, edgy is there
3. SaiVie: Firewall, print and backup apps, dapper is there.

Tags: personal machines, apps, laptop, linux

The path of the righteous coder is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil Ruby Users. Blessed is he, who in the name of PHP and good code, shepherds the weak through the valley of Rails, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost Syntuxes. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison a and destroy my brothers.

Tags: ruby users, furious anger, iniquities, vengeance, tyranny, brother

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Ben Chelf, Coverity wrote article titled Avoiding the most common software development goofs - Embedded.com
I will excerpt few paragraph of his article which I can’t agree anymore on it

If it’s clear to everyone that software defects are an expensive problems (and we assume that it is), why do developers make mistakes? Or rather, why do they make as many mistakes as they do to the point where NIST performs studies and shows that it is costing businesses sixty billion dollars a year? Based on our experience in developing software as well as interacting with thousands of software developers and seeing the types of bugs that come out of the software development process, we view the following as the top reasons developers make mistakes.

Ignorance. The reader might think from this header that we are taking a shot at the educational system that trains our software developers, but that is not the thrust of this argument. Developers are ignorant of the systems that they develop. A single developer can keep thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of lines of code in his or her head for the purpose of perfectly understanding how different pieces of the code interact.

However, today’s systems are in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions or tens of millions of lines of code. A single developer working on that type of system will be calling functions or methods of which they are quite ignorant. The pieces of the code that he is forced to interact with may have been written years ago by someone who is no longer available to explain their intent or nuance. So the developer does his best, quickly reading though the implementation or the comments (potentially incorrect!) provided when he needs to interact with another piece of the system. And this leads to errors.

Stress. We mentioned above that the developer does his best to “quickly” read through the implementation of a piece of code that he must interact with. If you are a developer, you probably didn’t think twice about the phrasing of that sentence (nor did we when writing it) because that is the reality of any software development process. Managers put pressure on developers to generate code quickly ” deadlines come fast and this leads to hasty coding and that leads to mistakes. Often these mistakes are not necessarily in the most common case of the code (since that is well tested), but on edge cases. When time is of the essence and developers are stressed, the parts of the code less traversed suffer. Yet these defects can be just as costly as mainstream bugs.

Boredom. Not all coding is rocket science. In fact, a good number of coding projects, once the design is complete, would be classified by most developers as “boring.” Of course, if a developer is bored, he is much less likely to produce good code than if he is excited about his work.

Pounding out those last few cases in a switch statement when the first few took dozens of minutes can be just mind-numbing enough to switch off the brain and make the simplest of mistakes. Boredom also leads to shortcuts ” if you are bored with any given task, you are probably looking for ways to eliminate your boredom as quickly as possible. And unfortunately, a shortcut in coding often translates to a defect in the code.

Human Frailties. Certainly the above points play into this last point about the very nature of human beings. Humans are creative and intelligent and able to solve difficult problems through reason. However, we are not robots. We are not so good at repeating the exact same operation thousands of times without some variance. If you doubt this, pull out a piece of paper and sign your name ten times.

Signing your name is probably something you’ve done thousands of times in your life, yet each time is a little different. This variance means that even if a developer understood every interface in a system perfectly, had all the time in the world, and were programming the most interesting project computer science has ever known, he would still make a mistake in the translation from the design in his head to the code that he writes. That is just a fact of life.

What I can say ? a very good analysis of reasons that lead to mistakes in developers life…

Tags: software development process, coverity, chelf, software defects, software developers, common software, developing software, educational system, nuance, billion dollars, thrust, hundreds of thousands, excerpt, tens of thousands, paragraph, bugs, implementation, stress

Let me get into the point

Ammar is one of the amazing people I got to know (unfortunately) four or five years ago; he’s sexy and act like tipsy :p; two or three years back we founded Jordan PHP Losers Group (Couple of losers doing PHP for living, darn what’s wrong with .NET) and yet we didn’t accomplish any of our plans but I really love and respect this guy and I even included him in my testament

Ammar is PEAR developer , PHP Security Consortium principal he has blog, caring mom and some suspicious relations.
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