One of the books I’ve been reading lately is Software Conflict 2.0. It’s a collection of essays by Robert Glass that was originally published as a book in 1990. The “2.0″ version of the book contains all the original (unedited) essays along with a handful of short retrospectives written by Glass for the second version of the book.

Robert Glass is a prolific author, and I’ve enjoyed his work before. The collection of essays in this book is no exception: despite being 15 years old they feel incredibly relevant to software engineering today. Particularly interesting are the portions of the book where Glass relates anecdotes of the early days of software development (room-sized computers, etc) and successfully ties the stories into today’s industry landscape. As a young practitioner in the software field, it’s often easy for me to think that the issues of today are somehow new and original. Reading older material like this is enlightening: the issues (the very same issues) that we discuss, debate, and write articles about today were being discussed, debated, and written about decades ago. In many ways, the software industry as a whole has re-learned the same lessons over and over again. I’ll save my opinions about why I think that happens for another blog post.

One of the authors Glass makes frequent reference to in his essays is David Parnas. I’ve heard of Parnas before but have never made the time to read anything he wrote. So today I searched Amazon and found a collection of Parnas’ most influential papers entitled Software Fundamentals. I’ve added the book to my soon-to-read list: I think it’s high time I become familiar with some of Parnas’ ideas and writing.

I’d recommend reading Software Conflict 2.0 to anyone with a general interest in software engineering. For more, check out the book site where you can sample a few of the essays:
http://www.developerdotstar.com/books/software_conflict_glass.html

Reading a blog post by Oren Eini reminded me of how much more productive I’ve been since I started using virtual desktop software on my day-to-day development machine (Windows). I used to set my taskbar to be 2 rows high, and it was almost always full (Oren set his 3 lines high and I probably would have too but I couldn’t stand losing that much real estate).

At some point I got sick of an order N search through the taskbar buttons to try to find the window I was looking for, and decided to get set up with virtual desktops. There are quite a few utilities out there to provide this functionality under Windows - even Microsoft offers an option as a powertoy. I ended up using a program called Virtual Dimension which is great. You can define as many virtual desktops as you like, and the software has all the features you’d expect like customizable hotkeys and on-screen displays.

I set my hotkeys to be Ctrl+Alt+[number], which seems convenient to type quickly. I typically use 4-5 virtual desktops, but I’ll increase to more if I’m doing a lot of multitasking on a given day. There’s no pattern to which windows go where - on a given day I group the windows in whatever way seems most efficient at the moment. Just for fun, here’s what I have on each desktop right now:

– Desktop 0: Campfire browser window, Thunderbird, FeedDemon, a few assorted Firefox windows
– Desktop 1: Reflector, an explorer window, a few text editor windows
– Desktop 2: Eclipse, SQL Server Management Studio Express
– Desktop 3: Word, more explorer windows, a text editor window
– Desktop 4: VMWare Server Console, Visual Studio, more text editors

I expected a slight gain in productivity when I switched to using virtual desktops, but I was blown away by how much of a difference it made. If you like to multitask, or just find yourself having lots of applications open at a time, give it a try.