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This is a great article! A must read for those just starting out and a good reminder for those who have learned these lessons the hard way. five habits of highly profitable developers

I love my cave! Shut the door and I am in the zone Nerd in a Cave

Rands In Repose is a great blog. I am frequently impressed by the wisdom regularly dished out. I found this post yesterday and had to share it for those of you looking for jobs in this 2.0 world. Developer 2.0

Joel on Software posted a great article today, it’s especially applicable if you manage a team of developers. The Development Abstraction Layer

The growing importance of concurrency in software development can not be over stated. Background Thanks to Weiqi Gao’s blog I recently found my self listening to a great lecture on the topic of concurrency by Herb Sutter. At the moment I am reading “The Singularity Is Near” by Ray Kurzweill and found many of the ideas mesh very well with what Mr. Sutter had to say. Kurzweill predicts that Moore’s law will continue for the foreseeable future but it may not be in the way we might first think. Just like Sutter he agrees that we will see more transistors per chip but much of his focus is on the point in the future when we will have enough computational power to simulate human brains. In order to achieve believable simulated humans with simulated neurons that truly fire in parallel we must begin developing more concurrent systems today and expand our expertise in this area of computer science. This lines up well with the physics limitations that Sutter points out in his paper that prevent us from further dramatic increases in the clock speed. In the past we have always enjoyed faster clock speeds with each new generation of CPU’s, in the future we will see CPU’s continue to grow in complexity and power but it will come in the form of more parallel instructions and multiple cores. We are already seeing these prognostications coming to fruition in the commercial sector with the introduction of multi-core CPU’s by major manufacturers. Quad-core CPU’s are less than a year away from both AMD and Intel. Based on Moore’s law we should expect 8 core CPU’s 18 months later and 16 cores shortly after that. Implications Developing excellent concurrent solutions is a very valuable skill that will serve you increasingly well over the years. Typical software that may only use a few threads or even be single threaded will not see significant performance gains as they are run on the next generation of CPU’s. Software must be redesigned to take advantage of the massively parallel capabilities that will be provided by tomorrows hardware. To this end it’s in our best interest to study up on the topic of concurrency in software development. Herb Sutter envisions a day when our programming languages can handle concurrent engineering in much more elegant ways than they can today. Threads and locks are too primitive therefore we need more abstract ways to describe tasks that must be done in parallel. My hope is that we will see these new idioms sooner so we can become more efficient with our time but the reality is such that we will be forced to use the tools at hand. To help you become more excellent in your development skills this post marks the beginning of a series on the topic of concurrency. To see all the posts on this topic click on the Concurrency Series link under CATEGORIES: on the left. Stay tuned for more. If you are not subscribed to this RSS feed please add this link to your favorite reader.