Feb 02
Graham Glass, a fellow brit who I admire, is writing about his experiences writing good software.
It is interesting to see how his software changed from a compiler for the COMAL language, to portable C++ libraries, to Java libraries, to web/grid services platforms. Tells you a lot about the changing times.
I also really liked his words on the generalities of his successful projects:
In general, these products received favorable reviews, were well received by the developer community, and some of them (like JGL and Voyager) won several awards. The development of the products had several common characteristics that I will write about in detail in future parts of this series. In the meantime, here are some of the highlights:
- Small teams, ranging from 1 to 10 people
- Top-notch developers
- Highly iterative development cycle
- High quality code and documentation
- Small, compact code
- Easy to use
- First versions were available as beta code quite early in the development cycle
