The Old New Thing

Raymond Chen’s small posts are equal parts entertaining, terrifying and enlightening. As a renowned Microsoft engineer, he shares very interesting bits of information on a wide number of topics: tricky algorithms, anecdotes from Microsoft, and my favourite topic: explanations of features that made it in the SDK. These often reveal some surprising side of software development that we rarely think about; and he comforts us by assuring that every software engineering decision is deliberate and has reasoning behind it.

Those reasons, mind you, might be borderline insane: my favourite story is when a team reverse-engineered some OS code, used that hack some undocumented structures, and when the OS got updated and the hacked solution stopped working, guess who they blamed? That’s right, the OS. And what did the OS team do? The reverted the structure so the program could work again. It’s logical, but… you get the idea.