More on Coders at work: concurrency bugs
If you're looking for my first / basic review of Coders at Work, it's here. Highly recommended.In the book, Peter Seibel asks each programmer what's the worst bug they've had to deal with. Many of the answers are concurrency bugs. Issues related to multi-threaded applications running many things at once.This makes complete sense. It's been my experience as well. Those concurrency bugs are really annoying.At HubSpot, we have one guy, Drew, who is just awesome at ironing these out on the Java side o

More on Coders at Work: reading code
I just posted my basic review of Coders at Work. It's a great book, go read it.This post has a few more observations and thoughts.First, reading code. A number of the programmers in the book talked about how often and how much they read code. I realized, while reading the book, that although I do the same thing (and have done it for 15 years now), I don't ask others to do it. I don't talk about it, but I just take it for granted, and that's wrong.Reading code has been extremely helpful for me professionally. Working on various open source pr

Book review: Coders at Work
A whole bunch of people have been talking about and reviewing Peter Seibel's Coders at Work since it came out several weeks ago. I love this kind of book anyways, but seeing the buzz around it moved it up my reading queue. I particularly enjoyed Jeff's review at Coding Horror, and Bryan's reviews on Journal of a Programmer

Israel trip, September 2009
I know, it's been two months since September. I'm far behind in my blogging ;(In September 2009, following our trip to China, I flew right to Israel. I could have come back to Boston for a few days, but I wanted to go straight to Israel for a couple of reasons, detailed below.First, I've always wanted to fly around the world. Going from Boston to China (via Toronto) westward, and then needing to go to Israel, gave me a chance. And I'm glad to say, that mission is now accomplished, so I can check it off my "life to-do list." For the record, my complete itinerary was Boston (BOS)

Boston Frisbee Halloween extravaganza!
I've written about Boston Frisbee before. It's the awesome group that's open and welcoming to everyone, which plays frisbee three times a week. I play sometimes on Sundays, on the grounds of the Boston Common. Logistics and other details are available.On Halloween weekend, they play a game in costumes. There are some funky special rules added for some points, contests, and more fun stuff. This past Sunday both Alli and I played in our costumes, and w