Abstract:
If you want to get a programmer talking, ask for advice on writing
good code. We're all full of it. But when you take a team of
programmers and ask them to build a working product with less
money, time, and resources than desired, something bad can happen.
The result isn't really very pretty.

Linden Lab, the developers of Second Life, have provided a very
interesting case study in medium-scale software engineering. Second
Life's client application (known as the viewer) was open-sourced last
year, after having been developed in a proprietary environment for
several years. It provides an interesting platform to take a look
at some suboptimal coding patterns that seem to occur frequently
in professional software development.

As a software developer for Linden Lab, I'm currently working on
improving the viewer. We'll examine a few of the things that could
have been done better, as well as some of the psychology of why such
things happen, and some rules of thumb regarding how to avoid making
such mistakes on other projects.