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waving android

I am currently a software engineer at Google, where as a member of the Android platform team I build frameworks and user interfaces.

The blog here at is mostly historical; you can find more recent posts on .

Archive for May 11th, 2005

Developing a nose for smelly code.

May 11th, 2005

A couple of months ago (as noted here), Joel (he who is On Software) professed his love for Hungarian notation—variable naming with little bits of metadata baked right into the crust. Tasty.

Today he returns to old Magyarország with a new article: Making Wrong Code Look Wrong. In it he details the cargo-cult mentality of the generations who have perverted the original H-notation idea since its invention:

In Simonyi’s version of Hungarian notation, every variable was prefixed with a lower case tag that indicated the kind of thing that the variable contained.

rwMax
prefix

I’m using the word kind on purpose, there, because Simonyi mistakenly used the word type in his paper, and generations of programmers misunderstood what he meant.

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How not to steal IP.

May 11th, 2005

The blogger known only as “drunkenbatman??? has published Deconstructing Maui X-Stream, which is a gripping (if seemingly-interminable) bit of private investigation into the allegations of source code theft and license violation of a certain fly-by-night software firm. It seems to go on forever, but that’s just how far you have to go to get to the bottom of the tangle of half-truths and covered tracks in this story. It’s like Law & Order for intellectual property geeks!

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