Some plans, or what's to be expected

...from this blog? As this blog is stalling a bit recently (I began several articles in parallel and they are each in a different phase of completion) I felt like it would be a good idea to reinstate the purpose of this blog. For me: to motivate myself to complete at last some of the most promising articles, and for my readers (yes, don't laugh, I know that nread >= 1!): to get some perspective if it'd worth reading this blog for the next time.

When I started, I had two purposes on my mind:

1. to write about some of my technical work which I found interesting
2. to give some interesting vistas on some general topics in SW developement - provided I can find some ;-)

So you can see this blog wasn't intended as uncoordinated blatherings, but rather a limited collection of articles: I simply haven't done that many interesting things or found that many new ideas. This can be explained by the fact that this blog is a sort of replacement for my old, nonfunctional, dilapidated homepage, which I really should update sometimes soon. But these days starting a blog is much simpler than re-working an old homepage (it's Web 2.0 now!). So let's extemporize a list of topics I've got in the pipeline:

1. Technical topics

• design and implementation of my own small lambda expression library in C++ (as it was fun)
• modal logic and tesing of multithreaded application (as it shows the limits of knowledge)
• using lock-free synchronization (as C++ programmers always worry about performance, maybe to much?)
• subtle Java vs C++ differences (as I like language-design discusssions)

2. General SW-engineering topics

• why is everybody keen on scripting languages (sociology applied ;-)
• Python's language design (coming to terms with Python hype)
• waterfall and XP methods (a somewhat different comparision)
• web services, SOAP an the (r)REST
• does speed really kill in SW-engineering?
• the new antipattern (some ruminations on singletons)
• C++ myths in the Java community (as most of the Java people know C++ only from fairy tales, I think)
• from DLL to XML hell (sometimes it must be a rant)
• Idiot's sorts (I mean sort algorithms...)

etc...

OK, let's get real. I'd be happy to complete the blogs on the three first topics from the list 1. and the four first topics from the list 2. In addition I'll sometimes do a "follow up" on some earlier blog entry. The one I must definitely write is a follow-up on the "Google Solvers"* blog: there is defintely something that has to be added to that one! Sometimes I'll simply extend some older article if it isn't too long, for example the "iPhone presentation"** blog: at the time of its writing I purposely omitted examining any of my guesses, now it's time to compare my intuitions with reality. And there are some other topics I've forgotten, but I may remember again sometime. As my distinguished colleague Stefan Z.* would say "Software engineering is like war, ...", so I'll keep on fighting.

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* http://ib-krajewski.blogspot.com/2007/07/google-solvers.html
** http://ib-krajewski.blogspot.com/2007/08/iphone-presentation-with-afterthoughts.html