There are 10 types of programmers in the world, those who have written a compiler and those who can’t read binary. I’ve never written a compiler. At college, I had to drop the class because of a conflict and have always wanted to write one ever since. Even if just to say that I can. The Elements of Computing Systems has a chapter focusing on building a compiler for the computer that is built throughout the book.

Two years ago, I learned that you can be a brilliant programmer and write awesome code but if your code doesn’t help solve some problem or doesn’t ease someone’s pain, then you’re not really doing your part. This is exactly the lesson that this book tries to drive home. It goes through the different aspects of creating a product from the programming and support to the licensing and legal side. The book also includes several interviews with people who have already done that.

My workplace has a subscription to SpringerLink. So I’ve been having a blast looking at the different books over there. I found lots of books that are on my Amazon wish list and so i was like a child at a candy store. The problem is that the books are provided via separate pdf files for chapters. I am not sure why they do that, I think to make it tougher to pirate the files?

Michael Ivey recently wrote about his git work flow over at My Git Workflow and it turned out to be a pretty useful article and was just the encouragement that i needed to blog about my own experience. Although I’ve used git before, I much rather use bzr whenever possible. I’m not into religious wars about tools, so use whatever you like. I work as an independent programmer(freelance programmer if you prefer) and so I am often working on several projects at the same time, mostly on my own, but sometimes with 1 or 2 more people involved.

Wikipedia has been a vital source of information for me and hardly a day goes by where i don’t use it to read up on something. Amazingly, topics covered on it range from the down right silly to the most advanced technical topic. All reviewed and scrutinized by the mass public. I just donated today as part of the “put your money where your mouth is” campaign. Although my donation is small and something i should have done a long time ago, I think that every bit helps and its always better late than never.