Passion
We like good things. Moreover, we like to create good things, which others will enjoy. Since we are software developers, our creativity is somewhat limited. We could build great houses or plant wonderful flowers or dance beautifully but all we do is software. You know what? We do like it! There are few things we enjoy the most. Read on you and you’ll know which.
C++ / STL / Boost
C++ is our favorite. We like it for its efficiency, portability and great OOP model. C++ compilers have been optimized for years and modern ones like Microsoft’s Visual C++ or gcc generate code which is as efficient as human would code it in ASM. Our style is widely based on STL and object-oriented design. C++ compilers exist for almost any modern platform and it’s definitely very nice to be able to offer fast solution and reuse big portions of the code when customer suddenly requests say PocketPC version of Windows application.
Visual Studio .NET
Microsoft really did a great work offering developers everything they need to develop for Windows. Visual Studio .NET is useful IDE and we like it as well as extensive documentation provided through MSDN. However, it needless to say that it’s still far from perfect. MSVS 2005 is somewhat heavy and slow and (probably not a bad thing) most of MSDN samples would never compile or run correctly without fixing few catches.
GUI
We like to make applications with GUI. The reason is simple – it’s the greatest pleasure to make something you can see and “touch”, something nice looking and working right. It’s not always the path filled with diamonds – sometimes it’s a real pain to seen how users try to use the application and stumble upon errors or obscure GUI. Still making GUI software applications is probably as close as you can get to the real magic!
COM
COM (Component Object Model) is the standard way to create extendable and interoperable applications for Windows platform. Extendibility via plug-ins is one of most important properties of modern software products (just as an illustration – all “big guys” – Microsoft, Adobe, Yahoo, Google do take advantage of it) and we adopt this model in our projects whenever appropriate. You absolutely need to be familiar with this somewhat complex technology and it’s kind of “green flag” for us when conducting interviews with C++ developer applicants.
.NET (C#)
As every developer targeting Windows platform we can’t ignore it. Although not as fast or portable as C++ .NET still allows (in some cases) making things done faster and with less code so we use it when appropriate. Apparently, Microsoft is certain about increasing market share of .NET applications and we are definitely moving along that trend.
LAMP (Linux / Apache / MySQL / PHP)
Despite our sympathy to Microsoft’s development tools, for web development we prefer open source platform. There are many reasons for this but top three are full control, great value, good scalability (at the cost of hardware, which is cheap). For intranet and business applications, we do use ASP.NET but this is a very special case.
Whiteboard
The last but not the least. Whiteboard (real white magnetic board mounted on the wall not the virtual one) is probably the best programming tool ever made. Or at least the oldest one.
Ironically, the “white board” is somewhat antonym to the “passion”.
