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Domain: goingware.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to goingware.com.
Stories · 4
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Overcomming Programmer's Block?
goingware asks: "What do you do if your productivity drops to two lines of code a day, and you just sit and stare at the code and feel like you don't know how to do it anymore? On the outside, it would seem my problem is that I've got some difficult architectural issues that I'm wrangling with. I'm not sure what the right way is to approach a certain feature I'm building into my program in C++. But what my real problem is that I just sit and stare at the computer all day long feeling scared and anxious. I'm afraid to try anything out at all for fear of making a mistake. I know I could just back up the code and write any old thing and throw it away if it's wrong, but for some reason knowing that doesn't help." What do you do when you are stuck in code and your focus leaves you? This isn't something as easy as getting up from the problem for a while (although that helps), this is sounds like something closer to burn-out. What can programmers do to combat this?"I've encountered this before, but it's not normally like me. I've been programming as a career for something like 13 years now and shipped dozens of products. I've had many obstacles before and overcome them through many and various means... means which all escape now.
Right now I feel like a clueless newbie assigned the task of re-architecting a nuclear powerplant control system.
This has really got me down. I have a product to ship. I called my client and asked to take a few days off from coding, and told her I'd be hitting the C++ books and taking a rest and trying to rejuvenate my programming creativity. She was OK with this. So part of that process is posting my question here."
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Intel Cancels 800 MHz Xeon
goingware writes: "This article at C|Net tells how Intel canceled plans to produce an 800 MHz Xeon. They had feedback from major OEMs telling them they wanted fewer speedbumps with larger incremental improvements. I think that's a positive step, actually. I know from doing performance analysis of software that simply making a speedbump to a processor doesn't win the end-user that much, it's mainly for marketing reasons. This is because the performance of real systems these days is limited so much by memory access times and other factors. It would be better if manufacturers concentrated on engineering improvements that would result in real performance gains rather than notching up the clock speed." -
Failed Dot-Coms Selling Private Info
goingware writes: "This article at CNet describes how troubled Internet companies are selling off customer data in an effort to pay off creditors or keep themselves afloat, in violation of stated privacy policies. Among the sites that are doing this are Boo.com and Toysmart. These companies were Truste approved sites before their failure. Note that when a company is bankrupt, its assets are divided up and sold off according to what the court orders, and may not have much to do with what the company tried to promise. I also noticed when checking out the articles that CNet uses doubleclick so you may want to browse the articles with cookies off." -
Manic Depressive Geeks
goingware writes: "I think a relevant followup to your recent article Slashdot meets the Pinkerton Corp. is the article Friends in High Places in the March 30, 2000 edition of the Metro San Jose. Included in the article is a link to a letter I wrote to Dave Winer's Scripting News about the relationship between programming and madness. The ad in the Metro seeking bipolar tech workers for the story promised confidentiality, but I chose to allow them to run my name and photo because I run a Web site for manic depressive people to educate them and their loved ones about the illness."