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Showing posts from December, 2009

I have joined the OSS community

Besides working a professional software engineer I have a few side projects that I have created. You can see them over at www.jrl-software.com. Recently I decided I would take the plunge and take an application I've created and license it under the GPL v3.0. I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about this whole GPL thing so this has been an interesting expirement for me. I like being able to download source code for many popular programs I use. But at the same time it's disconcerting to know people can see exactly what I've done and written in my code as well. So if anyone wants to look at the project it's hosted on sourceforge and you can see it using the link below. Filesort OSS It will be interesting to see what life if any takes off from this project. I have railed against OSS in the past but I think that was more of a rant against PHP than something against OSS in general.

Learning how to debug

There are a lot of smart programmers coming out of college. You learn a lot of great and important things about computer science and how to be a good programmer. However one thing I think more junior developers (and even us senior) ones can always learn more about is debugging. What debugging you say? Everyone knows how to debug man, just set a break point and step through the code. Well believe it or not but a time will come when you don't have complete access or control over the code you're relying on. So debugging is a lot more then just being able stop code execution. Because of this I recommend everyone read the following blog: Using winDBG winDBG is a debugging tool that allows you to debug windows based applications (even .net ones). It's quite powerful and while not easy to use can allow you to track down exceptions/crashes/hangs in your code. I'm just starting with it myself and the learning curve is huge but I have already learned several new technique