Dr. Dobb's Journal - July 2008 - (Page 10)

Developer Diaries edited by Michael Swaine Summit Meetings John Kodumal Employer: Coverity Job: Advanced Technology Developer DDJ: What’s your job at Coverity? JK: I work in the Office of the CTO. I spend most of my time developing new prototypes, but I’m also involved in fostering our intellectual property and shaping our future product direction. Learning To Say No Jonathan Nolen Employer: Atlassian Job: Director of Developer Relations DDJ: What’s your job at Atlassian? JN: I’m the Director of Developer Relations, so I work with the large community of softDDJ: What do you like about your job? ware developers. JK: It’s pretty much the perfect job for me—I have a research background in static analysis and DDJ: What do you like about your job? wanted to continue my work in a more practical setting. At Coverity, I get to apply my ideas to JN: I enjoy my job because I have the chance real software. That’s the ultimate litmus test in this area—a lot of ideas work well in theory, but to work in such a wide number of areas. they’re just not practical or scalable. Our software has to run on codebases that are tens of Atlassian is still a rapidly growing company, millions of lines of code or bigger. That requires unconventional thinking sometimes. DDJ: What do you find challenging about your job? and there’s more than enough work to go JK: When I explain to people that our software finds bugs automatically, the usual response around. So in any given week I get to be a is “Oh, so it’s like lint?” The previous generation of bug-finding tools like lint aren’t based developer, a blogger, a product manager, a on static analysis and have set the bar pretty low. Even some of the more recent tools are support tech, a UI designer, a build-engineer, just glorified pattern-matching algorithms. It can be tough to get past this initial a tech writer, and team leader. skepticism. DDJ: What do you find challenging about DDJ: What have you found that makes your job easier? your job? JK: Good development tools and good open-source software. Good tools can dramatically JN: As Steve Jobs said recently, the hardest improve productivity. Some of my favorites are distributed version-control systems like Mercurial, Git, or BitKeeper, and continuous integration tools like Hudson. We also use a lot part about having focus is “saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are.” of open-source components. I’ve become a big fan of both StringTemplate (a templating engine) and Glazed Lists (a list transformation toolkit). Both of these libraries do simple DDJ: What have you found that makes your tasks, but they do them extraordinarily well. We try to give back to the community by job easier? providing the Scan service (scan.coverity.com), which gives open-source developers free JN: I have to communicate with people all access to Prevent. over the world. I have colleagues in Sydney, DDJ: What do you like to do when you’re not programming? Poland, and Kuala Lumpur. There are JK: I’m a climber. It’s funny, climbing is such a geek sport. If you get to know the climbing Developer Network members all over community in the Bay Area, you notice that almost everyone is a developer, biologist, Eastern and Western Europe, North engineer, or scientist of some kind. America, and Australia. But we have an arsenal of amazing tools that actually makes collaboration possible. Atlassian uses the blogs Pablo Julio Rogina and wikis more extensively than any place Employer: AutoZone Inc. I’ve ever heard of. Skimming through our Job: Programmer Analyst internal blogs every morning keeps me up to DDJ: What’s your job at AutoZone? date on progress in all kinds of areas that I PJR: I’m a programmer analyst developing store might not ordinarily know about. And peoside applications, mainly with C++ and to some ple chime in with great ideas all the time, no extent with Java. DDJ: What do you like about your job? matter if it’s in an area directly related their PJR: Being part of a development team, there’s job. Also, we’ve started using Twitter recentalways a chance to learn, and at the same time to ly as a instantaneous broadcast medium to teach. people around the company, and it’s been a DDJ: What do you find challenging about your job? big help as well. I’m a big fan. PJR: Working for a Fortune 500 company is quite DDJ: What do you like to do when you’re not an experience. We need to meet our business users’ (our internal customers) expectations, and programming? always keep the pace with the technology to have a JN: My current obsession is RockBand. We got substantial advantage against the competition. RockBand in the San Francisco office a couple DDJ: What have you found that makes your job of weeks ago, but I’m still trying to get over the easier? hump from the “Medium” setting to “Hard.” I PJR: Several software tools: Eclipse and CDT, Git blog occasionally at jnolen.com. I also listen to (the distributed version-control system), valgrind, the unit testing methodology. A big load of a lot of music. I built a site called WishRadar patience and bright ideas from time to time. with some friends to help me catch deals on DDJ: What’s your hobby? used CDs…from Amazon. (I guess that’s still PJR: I’m fond of airplanes, both real (big) ones and programming, but it was for fun.) Patience and Bright Ideas the radio-controlled models. 10 Dr. Dobb’s Journal l www.ddj.com l July 2008 http://scan.coverity.com http://jnolen.com http://www.ddj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - July 2008

Dr. Dobb's Journal - July 2008 Contents Friday Night Fish Fry Alia Vox Developer Diaries Developer’s Notebook Engineers Without Borders Conversations Patricia Tries Event-Based Architectures Graphs Versus Objects Lock-Free Queues Dr. Dobb’s Architecture & Design World Java and the Nokia N10 Internet Tablet Effective Concurrency The Agile Edge Swaine’s Flames

Dr. Dobb's Journal - July 2008

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