On second thought, maybe I wouldn’t like working for Joel. From what I can glean, it’s an all-Windows shop. I don’t know if I do that. I don’t think of myself as a Windows developer. Not that I haven’t been one in the past. But these days I find myself mostly doing Mac stuff, and a little Unix. I haven’t launched Visual Studio in months. But I guess the fact that I’ve launched it at all says something. I expect I’d settle into a Windows developer job in a few weeks.

This has caused me to think about my OS habits, since I’ve noticed that I’ve been using my Mac more as a primary platform the past few weeks. I seem to go back and forth. I’ve got both a PC and a Mac in front of me at my desk, so I can pick either one. Sometimes the PC wins because it has a bigger screen (that’s a big win). Sometimes the Mac wins because of cool software like NetNewsWire. But although I can flip back and forth between computers in a specific task (for example, when I’m doing development on the Mac, I’ll often have documentation open in Web browsers on the PC), I tend to gravitate towards one or the other for “primary” things like email and Web browsing. It’s been Windows for a long time. These days it seems to be the Mac more. At least, when I’m at my desk. Away from the desk, Windows wins, because it’s what my current laptop runs. My next one won’t.

I think I blame Chimera. The Mac hasn’t had a Web browser that’s felt as fast as they do on Windows in a long time. I use Mozilla on Windows, and like it a lot, but Mozilla runs slow on Mac OS X, and so does Internet Explorer. But Chimera 0.6 is downright speedy. Enough so that I don’t notice the slowness when using it, at least. So I seem to be using the Mac more to browse the Web. And read my email. And write this weblog entry.

I’ve been reading a bunch of Joel on Software lately. He says a lot of things I find really interesting to think about. I’m not sure I agree with a lot of his opinions (he says far too many nice things about Microsoft and its methodologies, even if they might be true). Still, I like reading about software development techniques, and he’s verbose and well-spoken. If he were in St. Louis and hiring, I bet he’d be a good employer, too.

One quote I found that resonated:

If you show a nonprogrammer a screen which has a user interface which is 100% beautiful, they will think the program is almost done.

This turns out to be true of programmers, too. I remember in CS 194 when Greg and I showed our interface prototype, people said things like “wow, you’re almost done.” Of course, we were nothing of the sort. We’d spent a few hours mocking up an interface with PowerPlant, and there were clickable buttons and animated icons. But nothing actually did anything. We were weeks away from any sort of usable functionality. In fact, I’m sure there were interface elements in the demo that we ended up removing because we ran out of time to actually write the code behind them. But our demo looked cool!

(I note that I’ve mentioned my senior project a few times so far in this weblog. I guess it’s on my mind?)