Oh, finally somebody completed this sentence. This “Don’t reinvent the wheel” (or “Don’t invent the warm water” as we say it in Croatia) makes me feel bad whenever I code something that has already been done. And I’ve made a lot of libraries somebody already has done better then me. Like my own image viewer. [...]

For a few last weeks I was attending many developer meetings. We have been planning a new product and I’m trying to assemble a team who is capable to do it right. Trying to guide a diverse group of developers when they are exchanging their approaches to development can be amazing experience. There are many [...]

Paul W. Homer on his blog, The Programmer’s Paradox, posted an article about dependencies in software solutions. I constantly fight with this issues: old code vs new code, introducing a dependency or writing your own. I wanted to comment on his blog but I just couldn’t summarize everything I wanted to say in one comment. [...]

Design documents are such a hurdle. Why couldn’t I just sit at the computer and write the code? Hey, isn’t the software made from code? Shouldn’t the code be the best way to create a concept and test an idea? After all, when you’re done with the planning you’ll have some code ready and you [...]

I have a long line of unfinished projects. I like to start a new project, explore, learn and finally move on to something else before I make something visible. Sure, there is much code left, most of the time it’s reusable but i don’t really have some showcase, some folder with finished projects, with executables. [...]

I’m trying to add my projects to SVN (subversion), open source source control system. Installing and working with it is typical experience when using open source tools. There is no “download – install – use” procedure. As with other open source tools, you need to study it for some time, read some tutorials and guides [...]

I started using VB from version 3 as hobby but i have done some real work only on version 5 and 6. Backward compatibility was only burden for me: i didn’t have any old code with which i could have trouble upgrading while VB could be much better language if they didn’t care about backward compatibility.
This practice was broken with the release of .NET platform.

One of the biggest decision I’ve met as a project manager was to decide what to hard-code and what to make customizable.

My company were selling and supporting software from a foreign developer which had limited customizability for the end user. While they covered most scenarios for users in their country, our users always demanded one more feature which we couldn’t provide for them. As we were expert in the field we started developing our own software. We had some bits and pieces from previous works but all in all – we wrote software from scratch.

Based on our experience we wrote a feature list which contained about 200 core features. After five years, some features still didn’t make it in our software and I’m perfectly happy with this – if we covered them, we wouldn’t finish our software – never.

Recently I decided to take my shot at programming in PHP. As i programmed in ASP before I knew that server side programming concept wouldn’t be problem for me but as I never programmed in C-like language I thought it’ll be difficult to crunch through the syntax. I was surprised.

I went hunting for a bug tracker tool. It looks like there is tool for every pocket and server. PHP – Apache – MySql combination is prevailing in free open source field. Commercial and freeware tools all look the same in general and cover all the same functionality in different ways. In the end, somehow I discovered this little gem called BugTracker.NET. If I had time to write such a project I would probably wrote it this way. It’s free and open source, configurable to the smallest details without recompiling and works on IIS and SQL database, it’s written in ASP.NET and it’s easy to read. I fell in love immediately.