Jun 05
A study in software creation
With math and real life keeping me busy over the last 6 months, I’ve not had as much time as I wanted to work on one of my major passions - software development. I decided to change this over the last month, using spare minutes here and there to create and refine a new development style that I hoped would allow me to create polished work of higher quality with greater speed. Pretty much what every programmer wants, and what every programmer has his or her own opinions about.
Being a natural sceptic, my buzzword subscription policy is “Just don’t”. AJAX? A cleaning product. TDD? You mean you never tested things before? Agile development? No, I just write software in a chair, not hanging from monkey bars.
OK, that’s a bit harsh (and not entirely how I feel) but as an industry, we’re currently suffering from hype overload with regard to development methodologies. The “coming of age” of powerful IDEs, (more) modern language design and the Internet has created opportunities for each methodology camp to shout their ideas from the rooftops, with news starved IT journalists echoing it back. There is some good buried in the acronyms, and my idea is to dig a bit, and pan the gold from the mud. I’ll do this during the creation of a “soup to nuts” project that will scratch an itch I have.
Being a big IRC user/notepad user as well as a terrible speller, I’ve often found a need to quickly validate a word I’ve typed. Not wanting to load Open office/word every time, I decided one day to write a small spellchecker that I could leave running in the background, and call into life as a keystroke. This being a simple, tightly defined project, it seemed ideal to use it as my test candidate when developing my shiny new authoring style.
So, to war! As I write this, most of the work is done, so in the next few posts, I’ll detail what I did, how I did it, and how well it’s worked for me. At the end, I should find myself with a usable product that I can keep on my CV as well as post for the community to use. Let’s see how it goes…
June 5th, 2005 at 2:14 pm
[...] doing? Filed under: Programming, Code — Adam Wright @ 2:14 pm As mentioned earlier, the end goal is a Spell checking application that I can leave [...]