Adventures in Tech

I am not an Apple fan, but I do like their computers, and recommend them to colleagues and friends for a variety of reasons. They are well designed, and in addition to an excellent user interface, they run a flavor of Unix--which makes the life of computer programmers a lot easier. But most importantly, Apple's customer support is impeccable, that despite all the hardware issues I experienced in the past, I still recommend Apple computers. Let me explain why. A year and a half ago, I bought a Mac Book Pro for work. At the time it was the first generation unibody laptop, that had an i7 processor, lots of memory, and lots of disk space. Alas, like first generation models everywhere, it also had a lot of hardware problems. The most annoying of which was the screen randomly turning dark, with the hard drive spinning out of control. The only way to get out of this state was by forcing a reboot by holding down the power button, and losing everything I have been working on. At first ...

Not all of us are lucky to work with greenfield projects; the majority end up working with codebases that we inherit. These codebases have had their share of modifications that moved them away from the original elegant design: bug fixes, feature additions, and enhancements that were done in a hurry because of delivery pressure, without regard to code hygiene and future maintainability. The code then feels heavy, complex, hard to understand and more painful to maintain. There are a lot of ways to characterize code complexity, but the one that jumps to mind is "cyclomatic complexity" described by the McCabe paper from 1976  http://www.literateprogramming.com/mccabe.pdf .  The paper describes how to measure the cyclomatic complexity of different program control paths, and recommends a bound of 10 for manageable code complexity. NIST also selects the same number http://hissa.nist.gov/HHRFdata/Artifacts/ITLdoc/235/chapter2.htm . The numbers, despite being arbitrary, provide...