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| bio | website | |
|---|---|---|
| location | Scotland, United Kingdom | |
| age | 47 | |
| visits | member for | 2 years, 5 months |
| seen | Sep 28 '12 at 6:48 | |
| stats | profile views | 5 |
I'm an Engineering Manager working for a small company (~30 employees) which is part of a worldwide group (~10k employees). My team writes embedded firmware for our custom-designed handheld instruments, running Windows CE. The bulk of our work is still in Visual C++ / MFC, but new projects are now being written in .NET (using both C# and VB).
I've been an engineer since 1986, starting in DSP hardware but moving to pure software in 1990. I've worked on digital radio, speech encoding & encryption, CD-i applications, Win16 and Win32 applications, CGI script applications and Windows CE (2.11 through to 6.0) applications, using C, C++, C#, VB3, VB.NET, Perl, HTML, Linux shell scripts, DOS batch files etc.
Although I am now a manager I still do some hands-on programming: debugging, maintaining old stuff, and helping out on the new stuff when bandwidth is tight.
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Jun 28 |
awarded | Teacher |
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Apr 24 |
comment |
Has whitespace in identifiers ever been idiomatic? I seem to remember (looking back to the 1980s here!) that CORAL did something similar - you could (and did) have white space in variable names, but keywords then had quotes around them (like 'DEFINE' and, a personal favourite, 'COMMENT'. We used to use the macro processor to replace these with un-quoted versions). |
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Jan 11 |
comment |
How do I approach a coworker about his or her code quality? +1 for the "Why" warning: most people go on the defensive as soon as you say "Why" |
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Dec 9 |
answered | Alternatives to Professional Version Control |
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Sep 12 |
comment |
Teaching C++ to first time high school students: Where to draw the line? @recipriversexclusion: don't worry about what Stroustrup says! He may be a genius at designing languages, but I am afraid he's not a patch on Kernighan and Ritchie, or (by a mile) Larry Wall, at teaching ordinary mortals how to use them! |
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Aug 2 |
comment |
How do you define elegant code? +1 for "simple, elegant, and wrong": I've seen a few of those! However I'd say Readability far outweighs Succinctness. |
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Feb 22 |
comment |
Why write clean, refactored code? @ Danilo -- in theory I'd say you are right but in practice I have found virtually no "fire once and forget" code. I always tell people working with me "there is no such thing as test code": better to write it neatly / maintainably from day one IMHO (but it is just an opinion!) |
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Jan 29 |
awarded | Supporter |
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Jan 29 |
comment |
Is it true that a stricter coding style is always better? +1 - I think this summarises the pros and cons pretty well. |
