Curtis Bartley

I'm a software engineer in Seattle, Washington. Currently (May 2003) I'm working part time as a research assistant at the Human Interface Technology Lab at the University of Washington. My most recent real job was at Tangis, where we did software for wearable computers.

Prior to Tangis, I worked at a company called Netpodium which was acquired by INTERVU, which was in turn acquired by Akamai. It's just as well that I never did get my INTERVU business cards. Whose idea was it to supply business cards in lots of 400, anyway?

In the past I worked for a startup called Dimension X, which was acquired by Microsoft, and that's how I ended up in Seattle.

Before Dimension X, I worked at a little company in Dallas, Texas called Altsys. Altsys probably didn't qualify as a startup by the time I got there because they were making a ton of money licensing FreeHand to Aldus. Then came the Adobe-Aldus merger, and Altsys got bought by Macromedia.

I used to do a lot of coding in C++, but for the last couple of years I've been programming mostly in Java. When I'm doing quick and dirty stuff or I just want to program for fun I usually use Python. Unlike many of Wiki's participants, I have historically been involved in the shrinkwrap application side of the business. Now I'm learning about distributed applications, databases, and reliability.

I have a website at http://www.almostinfinite.com and I can be reached by e-mail at mailto:cbar1@almostinfinite.com. Right now the website is just a place to put my online resume and to hang a semi-permanent e-mail address off of. One of these days I may put some more interesting stuff there, but I'd recommend that nobody hold their breath.

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Here's a list of books that I think every C++ programmer should read:

• Meyers, Effective C++ (ISBN 0-201-92488-9 )
• Meyers, More Effective C++ (ISBN 0-201-63371-X )
• Coplien, Advanced C++: Programming Styles and Idioms (ISBN 0-201-54855-0 )

Here's some other books I recommend:

• PeopleWare by Demarco and Lister
• CodeComplete by SteveMcConnell
• DeathMarch by Yourdon
• Rise & Resurrection of the American Programmer by Yourdon
• PatternsOfSoftware by Gabriel

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I've started a few pages on Wiki:

• WhyPatternsAreInteresting -- An observation that sometimes it's the problem that a pattern is trying to solve that's interesting rather than the solution to the problem. Maybe others should add their opinions here as well, since I don't think this is the only reason that patterns are interesting.

• DebuggingAndTheScientificMethod -- Computer programmers use the ScientificMethod every day, whether they think about it or not.

• HowFastCanYouWriteCode -- Peak programmer productivity is much greater that average programmer productivity. What's the fastest you've ever written code?

• IdentifiersAreComments -- Just because code doesn't have traditional comments doesn't mean that it's not commented.

• FreeHand -- My first job out of college was working for the company that did Aldus (now Macromedia) FreeHand.

• ItWasSomethingYouJustDid -- This is a special case of BlameYourselfFirst, and it's a lesson that I keep learning over and over again.

• WhatAreAssertions -- What are assertions, when should they be used, etc.

• OoIsNotAboutReuse -- OO has significant benefits, but re-use isn't really one of them.

• FreeHandProcess -- the development process that Macromedia uses to develop FreeHand

• I need a ProgrammersThesaurus.

• SoftwarePuzzleAnalogy -- In my experience, building software is a lot like solving a jigsaw puzzle.

• EnterpriseCorba -- Book Review of Enterprise CORBA.

• OneRealWorldLoggingSystem

• PrototypeAllTheTime -- the way I usually end up writing most of my code.

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Things to look at when I have more time:

• OnLineComputerMuseum

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Pages to remember:

• DeveloperTurnedManager

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Since you asked for feedback if we read far enough: I looked at OneRealWorldLoggingSystem and found it pretty interesting. Thanks. -- cb.

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Hi Curtis! No I'm not at Macromedia any more, I've updated my home page with my latest news. The MsWiki link on your site is broken. I'm interested in alternate WikiUserInterface and would like to check it out. --SarahAllen Calling it a website is being overly generous. The MsWiki link never went anywhere. However, if you go back to that page (http://www.almostinfinite.com/preprocess.htm) and do a view source, you can see some of the example mark-up and JScript to automatically format it. -- cb

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