Basil Vandegriend: Professional Software Development

As a software developer what practices do you consider essential? Which practices are must-haves that you would refuse to build software without?
I believe that producing good software is hard, and that we software developers need all the help we can get in developing software. I have put together a list of the top five practices […]

Here is a request to all vendors of development tools: please persist code to text files. Over the last few years, I have encountered an alarming number of tools that do not use text files. Some examples are:

A reporting tool that stores report definitions as binary files.
A data modeling tool that persists models as binary […]

I am happy to announce that this is the one-year anniversary of my website! I wanted to take this opportunity to share my observations and lessons learned since my last retrospective after the first three months. Running my website has continued to be an incredible learning experience. I have learned more about building web traffic […]

Subversion is open source version control software that has significantly gained in popularity over the last few years as a replacement for CVS. I have been using Subversion for a while for my personal projects at home. It has generally worked well, but I have encountered a few difficulties along the way.
One reason I like […]

My previous article talked about the importance of maintainable software. In this article I provide some recommendations on how to create software that is maintainable - easy to change with minimal risk and impact.
What are the specific challenges facing developers maintaining software?

They probably did not originally develop the software, and may not even […]