I never expected to write a column in a programming journal but somehow that seems to have happened. I started the “In The Toolbox” column in the ACCU’s C Vu journal in a desire to inspire other programmer’s to write about the tools they use to do their job. Naturally I wanted to lead by example and somehow I’ve managed to write the first six instalments, instead of just the odd one or two. Although the best way to access is the content is to become a member of the ACCU, I have collated them here now for convenience.
0: Introduction
An outline of what the column was intended for.
1: Team Chat
A piece on the various chat/discussion systems I’ve used in my programming endeavours. It extends what I started out writing about in one of my earliest blog posts “Company-Wide IRC Style Chat & Messaging”.
Examples of how I’ve used scripting languages to create simple scripts that hide some of the complexity that occurs when stitching together various tools to do build, testing, etc.
3: Pen & Paper
My lo-tech solution to keeping track of what I’m supposed to be doing on a day-to-day basis.
I like to lean heavily on static code analysis tools when writing code as I believe they help me stay clear of a lot of common pitfalls that are valid language constructs, but can also be used all too dangerously. I’ve touched on some of this before too in a very early blog post “Where Are the 'Lite' Editions of Static Code Analysis Tools?”.
I’m a Twitter addict; this article was about how I use social networking in my professional programming career.
The other tool I also lean heavily on is the Version Control System as I like to look back over a project’s changes to help my understand why a particular change might have been made.
