Author Archives: martincmartin

Finding A Job You’ll Love: Recruiters

Ah recruiters. If you understand their motivations and find a good one, they can work wonders. But the average and bad ones can be worse than searching yourself. When looking for a job, you should definitely search on your own … Continue reading

Posted in Brain Rental | 4 Comments

Reading The Fine Manual

I’m always amazed how long people spend trying to figure out software by fumbling around with it, rather than reading the manual. Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “Golly Martin, reading manuals is all swell and good, but … Continue reading

Posted in Brain Rental, Process | 5 Comments

Introductory Books on Web Testing

Someone at work asked for introductory books on testing, that would help them test our web site. I think these are the best, and thought I’d have some fun with Amazon’s web widgets. Amazon.com Widgets

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Concurrency ≠ Threads

Here’s a conversation I seem to be having over and over these days: Someone else: Computers are getting more and more cores. So, we need to thread our software to take advantage of them. Me: But threads (the Dijkstra style … Continue reading

Posted in Random Thoughts | 19 Comments

Should you pursue your PhD?

“A PhD is a big, multi-year project. You really learn self-reliance, how to budget your time, and how to motivate yourself,” says Martin Martin, a senior software engineer with a PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University. From Should you … Continue reading

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Where are the fast dynamic languages?

But I also knew, and forgot, Hoare’s dictum that premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming. — Donald Knuth Something bizarre happened on the Groovy-dev mailing list the other day. Alex Tkachman made what I thought was … Continue reading

Posted in Programming Languages | 36 Comments

What I’ve Learned From Programming In Lisp

Two years ago I landed a job at ITA Software, which Paul Graham called one of the “ten or twenty places where hackers most want to work,” along with Google. And one of the interesting things about ITA is that … Continue reading

Posted in Programming Languages | 34 Comments

Ian Simon Martin-Swader

    Ian Simon Martin-Swader joined our family July 12, 2007 at 1:17 pm 6 pounds 0 ounces 18 inches long Mother doing well Father low on sleep – Martin, Joy, Amber, Miles and Ian #flickr_badge_source_txt {padding:0; font: 11px Arial, … Continue reading

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How to Interview A Manager

There’s been a lot written about interviewing programmers, and about good management, but I couldn’t find anything about how to interview managers. So I’ve been looking into it and thought I’d write up what I’ve learned so far. First of … Continue reading

Posted in Brain Rental | 2 Comments

Life and Death

There’s a great old game I remember for my Amiga, called Life And Death. The WHDLoad download has the manual and solution, but not the game itself. I found the PC version at a number of abandonware sites, including: XTC … Continue reading

Posted in Game Design | Comments Off on Life and Death