Welcome!

Hi everybody. My name is Derrick Coetzee. I'm totally new to the blog scene - I've barely read any, much less written any - so you'll have to forgive me if (or rather when) I do anything ridiculous. I created this blog to discuss some of the technologies and techniques that interest me most and help expose them to more of the developers out there in the world, as well as to get in touch with people who can tell me more. Because I want to be able to talk about a number of related areas, I had trouble finding a blog description to cover them all, but in the end I settled on "Tools, techniques, and theory for measuring and improving the power and performance of developers and their code." Now, that's a mouthful, but it includes, among other things:

  • Programming language technology and features, both established and nascent
  • Compilers, compiler optimizations, and some of the limits of compilers
  • Static checking tools for detecting errors such as Lint, FxCop, Spec#, and many others
  • Scalable algorithms and data structures for efficiently solving large problems, including cache-optimized data structures
  • Debugging tools and techniques such as gdb, Windbg, Visual Studio, instrumenting, and custom tools
  • Coding and quality enforcement techniques
  • Theoretical limitations of and equivalencies among real-world problems and how this helps us solve them
  • Occasionally, something completely random

I intend to address one subject at a time and go into some detail about each one and how it can help you. I hope everyone - including me - will learn something from this blog. Welcome!