A few years ago, I wrote Makefiles are Software Too, which laid out some "generic requirements" for any build scripts (Make, Ant, Scons, Fabric, etc) that you're writing. I still think those are important, but over the past (nearly) four years I've worked with more systems, and I ...

I'll take an array over a giant switch-case statement any day.

1. The array definition will be more compact and easier to see all at once.
2. Defining actions in an array enforces uniformity.
3. You can put checks in the code to automatically verify that the array definition is complete. (I ...

At some point your team is going to be gone. Not all at once (well, maybe, but in that case you won't care), but over time turnover will completely replace your team.

If you are the manager, and you outlast the team, you're going to pay for low ...

If the comments are ugly, the code is ugly (via slashdot). Amen! I get uncomfortable whenever I have to leave a long comment, but it's usually to document some deficiency in a lower layer that the code is working around. Typically broken hardware. (So that someone coming behind me ...

This post was inspired by recent experience with some horrible build scripts from the open source world — but I've seen enough in-house badness over the years that I wanted to establish some basic parameters for build scripts.

This is a really broad way to divide the world, but I ...