Writings and ramblings
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A Monolith, Perhaps?
In the context of this article, the word “monolith” is used to represent monolithic development: a software or environment that lives in one source code repository and has one versioning scheme. This does not necessarily mean a single…
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Just some pointers
The book “Machine Code for Beginners” (by Usborne, 1983) likened computer memory to a shelf or a cabinet with lots of tiny little drawers, all of which can hold just one byte of information at a time. The…
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The Information Problem
There’s a lot of information available for software developers. On one frequently updated list of free programming books on GitHub, there are several thousand books listed for different programming languages and subjects, in almost 50 languages. And these…
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The Three-Axis Problem
Generation X, Gen-Y (or millennials), Gen-Z. These are terms we use in everyday language to categorize the last three generations that form the majority of global workforce. What are they? Where did the labels come from? Why is…
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What is Software Salvage
Summary This article describes the method for software rewrites when the original source code is unavailable – or unstable, of questionable quality or otherwise the product of a beautiful mind. Background One part of what I do is…
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Numeric Value of (nothing) Is Zero
Background Part of what I do is software salvage. I’ve had the joy of working on bringing life back to abandoned codebases, extend them with new features, modernize services and translate software from obsolete programming languages, operating systems…
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Transference of Complexity
Summary Programming languages have evolved in accessibility, complexity and readability in the past six decades. The overall internal complexity of a single software application has grown exponentially, while the amount of code lines written to achieve a specific…
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Google site-kit plugin for WordPress update mayhem
I recently did a blanket update for all plug-ins for a WordPress site (good idea security-wise, bad idea, turns out, otherwise). This revealed a surprising three problems within the whole ecosystem. Here they are in descending order of…
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Compiling Pixar’s USD natively on Windows 11 / VS 2022
If you’ve tried it, you’ve probably run into the endless catch-22 that is getting everything to behave when trying to compile the Universal Scene Description on a newly setup Windows machine. NOTE: if there’s any way for you…
