To the optimist, the glass is half full. To the pessimist its half empty. And to the engineer, the glass is twice the size it needs to be. As an engineer, I love that joke. It gets right at the heart of why we as enginerds often have such a hard time communicating with real people. However, it also reminds me just how demoralizing it can be to work with the pessimist. Attitudes in software development To Mr./Ms. Pessimism new ideas and new thinking are “yet another thing I have to learn”,...

So here’s the deal... lately Rob has been kicking the hornet’s nest and stirring up all kinds of controversy, and discussion, amongst the asp.net community. The conversation is mainly focused around the use of inline scripting and plain old HTML camp versus the more traditional asp.net way of doing things with all server side programming and PostBacks. The conversation is challenging some of the core concepts that many asp.net developers hold true. Concepts and practices that Microsoft has handed down as gospel over the past several years. It’s a good old fashioned holy war. The kind that gets...

Phil recently wrote about some of The Most Useful .NET Utility Classes Developers Tend to Reinvent Rather Than Reuse - an article chock full of tasty tips, tricks, and reminders about [.net] framework features you forgot (or never knew) existed. One of the utility classes Phil mentioned was the System.Web.HttpUtility class. Two of the super useful methods this class offers are UrlEncode and UrlDecode... used to uh, convert a string into a URL encoded string and decode a URL encoded string, respectively. Do you encode? All web developers, regardless of language/platform, should be intimately familiar with the basic encoding schemes...

A recent post by security analyst David Kierznowske reports that 49 out of 50 WordPress blogs that he checked out were running an exploitable version of the WordPress blogging engine. According to the post, David looked at blogs running on versions as far back as WordPress v1.2 (with v2.2 being the most recent release, as of this writing). So does this mean that WordPress is buggy software that is to be avoided? No, not at all. It just means that those users need to do a better job of dealing with the bugs. The sky is blue and software has bugs...

In his Working for The Man piece Jeremy Allison lays out six lessons he's learned over the course of his career in software; six lessons he'd like to go back and tell himself at the beginning of his career. Whether you're a code-slinger just starting out or a seasoned veteran with wisdom and design patterns coming out your ears, this is a great read. So go read it now... I'll wait. This is me, waiting... See I told it was good, didn't I? Even though I've only been in the software business for half a decade I've already learned many of...