I’ve recently been working in Clojure on some code that really benefits from parallelization but doesn’t need to squeeze the last available cycle out of the machine.

Of course, if you’re using Clojure, you’re also using Leiningen as the universal build and configuration system. Accept no substitute. Now if I could only remember the syntax to run a single test when I’m refactoring some code and need to reflect the changes in the test suite via the build system and not just from inside the REPL?

GNU Emacs 24.5 was released on April 10th. I’m in the process of setting up a dual boot Windows/Linux machine right now as I’m slowly moving away from Mac OS X, mainly because of the cost of the hardware but also because I don’t like it that much as a Unix-y development environment anymore.

Xubuntu 14.10 only comes with Emacs 24.3 and it looks like 15.04 will “only” include 24.4 so now is a good time as any to manually install 24.5. Please note this is not a complaint about Ubuntu and its many contributors. They do a great job, I’d rather have a stable system comprised of well-tested packages and install the exciting, cutting edge stuff manually.

Stuff you find that shows you’ve been around this programming business for a while:

Most people these days are surprised that Symantec actually sold a C++ compiler at some point. I used this particular copy in my first, not very successful business venture - I started out using Walter Bright’s Zortech C++ compiler which eventually morphed into Symantec C++.

I’m generally more of a grep person but sometimes it’s easier to just use the built-in search in Visual Studio, especially if you want to be able to restrict the search to parts of your Visual Studio solution. Visual Studio does have pretty powerful search built in if you do use regular expressions instead of the default text matching. Here are a couple of regexes to get you started:

Find all shared_ptr calls that use “new” instead of the recommended make_shared: shared_ptr<.+>(new .+)

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’m trying to improve my blogging workflow by using org2blog to draft my posts before pushing them to my WordPress blog. When I posted yesterday I had the basic workflow going, could edit posts in Emacs, save them, update drafts and push them to WordPress. The last piece that was missing was getting spell checking to work.

I’ve actually never spent much time thinking about spell checkers until I discovered that OS X doesn’t come with a spell checker that ispell recognises. A little research led me to Joel Kuiper’s blog post on spell checking in Emacs on Mac OS X. I decided to install Hunspell as it seemed to be modern, supported and able to do the job. Plus, it’s available via Homebrew which I’m already using to install other Unix software on my OS X machine. A quick

I try not to post too many metablogging posts. Other people do it better and I’m trying to focus on journalling what I learn as a software engineer and manager, not what tools I use for blogging. However after losing another post to WordPress’s built-in editor I decided Something Must Be Done. I think this is only the second post I lost, but it’s a fairly regular occurrence for a journalist friend of mine and I really don’t have that much time to retype blog entries that ended up in Bit Nirvana.

Over on bitbashing.io, Matt Kline has an interesting blog post on how Shipping Culture is hurting us as an industry. Hop over there and read it now, because he addresses another case of the pendulum having swung too far. Your developers take a long time to get a new version out? I know, let’s make them ship something half baked. Quality is overrated anyway. Especially when you don’t have a reputation to lose as a maker of quality software.

We all know good people who can’t get a job for some odd reason, but whenever I find myself on the other side of the table I am amazed at how people don’t even bother to follow a couple of simple steps to massively increase your chances for a response. Yes, a lot of big companies seem to have their jobs email address hooked up directly to /dev/null but small companies still make up the majority of the software development landscape. With a small(er) company, there’s a good chance that your email ends up directly with the hiring manager. Somebody like me, for example.

I encounter this on a fairly regular basis - a project uses a third-party library and there is either a bug in the library that we can’t seem to avoid hitting, or there’s a feature missing or not 100% ideal for our use case.

Especially when dealing with an open source library, at this point someone will inevitably suggest that we have the source, so we should just fix/hack/modify the library and get on with our lives. I’m massively opposed to that approach, with essentially one exception I’ll mention towards the end.

Debugging an intermittent problem with a some demo code in the Javascript BBC Master emulator. I love the hard core bit fiddling.