The first time I got in touch with a software engineering process was at university. I am amazed, but very happy that that experience did not diminish my interest in software engineering processes. As you can guess, we were obliged to follow a very heavyweight process (probably one of the most extreme), that the university lend from the European Space Agency (ESA). In retrospect, it might have been one of the most educational of the practical experiences I went through in my years at the university. But while we were undergoing the project, it certainly didn’t feel that way. We tried to deliver quality software, stuck with that malicious standard that did more harm than good. In the end we spent 80% of our time on writing a pile of specification documents stretching many centimeters in height, which we ‘archived’ in a drawer somewhere, leaving us with only 20% of our time left to actually deliver a product.
I kept on thinking that there must be another way, where you do write specifications, that actually help you in the process of writing software, instead of simply following process. Continue reading ‘Software Specification — A Blessing In Disguise?’
Lately I have been busy implementing several things using the libraries available under name of Boost. Continue reading ‘Boosting Productivity’
In a previous post I became all nostalgic and talked about my very first programming project called FM Tracker. I dug it up from my backup archives to see if I could bring it back to life again. I tried to revive my baby using the magical powers of DOSBox, and amazingly I succeeded! Continue reading ‘FM Tracker in Dosbox’
I finally found the time to implement a new look for code-muse.com. Many thanks to the guys who created the K2 style for Wordpress, which made my life so much easier to freshen up my blog’s design. For the header, I used the picture that I took while I was on top of the Dom tower in my beloved hometown Utrecht.
Thinking of my early years of programming, I almost cannot believe that I have already been writing computer programs for so long. My first decade of software development slowly went by. I’m even well into the next decade, considering I wrote my first statements on an 8086 in 1994 (while I should have been playing football with the guys of course, the nerd I was, ahem, am). Back then, my very first project, at least the project which I consider a real substantial undertaking, was “FM Tracker”. Continue reading ‘A Decade of Programming’