Open Kosmaczewski

Published in 1975, “The Mythical Man-Month” is considered an all-time classic in the software engineering field. The book author, Frederick P. Brooks Jr., used his experience as the project manager of the IBM System/360 and its software, the Operating System/360, to explain a common set of problem patterns, applicable to other software projects as well.
One [...]

Software Engineering is the youngest of all the professions, being born around 50 years ago, but since then it has been continually improved. Practicers have fiercely debated upon it through the years, given the extremely fast pace of the innovations in the field, and the extremely difficult and inherently dynamic nature of software. Many trends [...]

I’ve just had a very interesting conversation with my colleague Marco about different approaches to the organization of code inside a Django application.
As you might know (and if you don’t I’ll tell you anyway), Django’s views (somehow occupying the “Controller” level in an MVC architecture) must take (at least) an HttpRequest instance as a parameter and must [...]

Introduction
Charles Petzold, in its book “Code”, states the following:
In theory, application programs are supposed to access the hardware of the computer only through the interfaces provided by the operating system. But many application programmers who dealt with small computer operating systems of the 1970s and early 1980s often bypassed the operating system, particularly in dealing [...]

Introduction
Modern operating systems provide a clear separation of the kernel processes from those running in user space, which prompts the question of how to access I/O devices from user processes, without breaking the above mentioned architectural separation, which guarantees stability, security and performance.
Several approaches are available, depending on the level of abstraction used and [...]

Introduction
Five years ago I worked as a Software Engineer for a startup, based in Geneva, Switzerland, which had the goal of creating a web-based systems management console, to control and monitor the status of large computer installations, much like Microsoft SMS (Systems Management Server) does. This tool would eventually benefit from being a web-based application, [...]

This is a rant: I am tired of seeing virtual methods implemented in child classes that, at some point or another, call the method of the same name in the base class. For me this is a sign of poor architecture. A bad, bad smell in code.
Let’s say that you have a base class, called, [...]

Since data and instructions are stored in RAM in pretty much the same way, a priori the CPU cannot distinguish each other, but by the cycle in which the binary chunk is fetched from memory. In the case of instructions, it then needs to decode the operation codes into instructions, with the added problem that [...]

In his weblog, Michael Platt has posted an interesting article, comparing different definitions for the word “Architecture”; interesing read! http://blogs.technet.com/michael_platt/archive/2006/03/27/423300.aspx

Introduction
This is a tricky question; after all, Bill Gates himself published a book in 1995, “The Road Ahead”, where he only slightly talks about the World Wide Web:

“The Road Ahead” appeared in December 1995, just as Gates was unveiling Microsoft’s master plan to “embrace and extend” the Internet. Yet the book’s first edition, with its [...]