If you notice a lot of attention being given to process improvement, it’s a sure sign that all the smart employees have left the company and those who remain are desperately trying to find a “process” that is so simple that the boneheads who remain can handle it. –Scott Adams

Dr. Alan Kay talks about the Meaning of “Object-Oriented Programming”. His summary:

OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I’m not aware of them.

Steve McConnell walks us through a bunged estimation process, for a kid’s playhouse he built this summer. He shows us, in real-world terms, the sorts of estimation bugs that creep into our thinking about project planning.

Guy Kawasaki’s guide on How not to hire people on Craig’sList. While I hate the phrase, “keeping it real,” job postings need to be approachable, easy to grok, and based in reality.

A Google code search of an evil C++ preprocessor macro hack.

A good essay on not putting code in your Win32 exception handling, and more reasonable approaches for dealing with about-to-be-dead processes.

Here’s an excerpt from an upcoming book that describes process intensity, which is the amount of processing power (and effort spent developing it) used by the plot of a game. Some more background on the concept of process-intensity.

A Multics engineer writes about the hiring process, and a random follow-up set of phone screening questions.

The natural language processing faq.

A discussion about Upstart, a new sysvinit replacement. Upstart is slated to replace the classic SysV init boot process in Ubuntu Edgy this fall.