Sometimes I write technical words. Other times I do technical things.
And when I write about technical things, I mostly write to communicate concepts or "wisdom" I've learned the hard way. The first bit of technical wisdom here is a story about parsers, messages and loosely coupled systems called "Goldilocks and the 11 Parsers" (remember, in binary, "11" is how you write out the number "3".)
One of the more popular technical things I wrote was the "Strange Programmer Habits" series. Originally on a long-forgotten blog, it inspired a number of seasoned programmers to either violently agree with me or tell me I was an idiot.
The next bit of wisdom is a (very) short essay based on my experience helping customers adopt ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software packages and in writing ERP software. The essay "Using SAP Software Does Not Make Your Enterprise Better" probably sounds like it's going to be a slam on SAP R/3, but it's not. For the record, I'm a fan of SAP software; but not all organizations are ready for SAP. My assertion here is that changing your organization so you can make use of ERP packages is *MUCH* more useful than the software itself.
The opinion article titled "On the Usefulness of AR/VR Headsets" is from an earlier time when everyone was going crazy about headsets. Having used VR and AR systems "back in the day" and watched the tools evolve over the last 25 years, I'm hoping to throw a tiny bit of cold water on the over-hyped expectations.
If you're a fan of Virtual Worlds, you may be interested in the Virtual Worlds Region Agent Protocol (VWRAP). It was an attempt I helped manage at Linden Lab to standardize the "Next Generation Second Life Protocol." I collected a number of blog posts and references and put them on the "What is VWRAP?" page.
Not all of my technical writing is abstract. When I hit on an interesting pattern (or anti-pattern) I like to write about it. One of the more controversial things I wrote was a simple article about how I preferred to put my app configuration settings in a place outside the app. This lets me change them without worrying I accidentally introduced a bug in my code. It also allows me to segregate access to the code vs. access to the config info. (This is important in many environments where they don't want app developers to have unfettered access to production system database passwords and the like.) If this is something that interests you, check out "Is NODE_ENV an Anti-Pattern?"