Tag Archives: programming

When is It Good Enough?

Anecdotes are dangerous. Scott Koon has one about fixing a doorknob, linking it to the now-infamous Spolksy duct-tape programmer post and writes: Think about that the next time you reject a new programming tool because you think it might take … Continue reading

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Framework Failures for Beginners

Zef Hemel writes about the inscrutable error messages that he gets when making typos in Ruby on Rails, Scala and JBoss Seam. I recently saw a new programmer struggle with the RoR errors and I have been a victim of … Continue reading

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Why Your Academic Record is Important

Jon Skeet has a long post on how programmers fall prey to pretty nasty bugs because they aren’t aware of the details of what they are doing. And he offers the following thoughts: First, try not to take on more … Continue reading

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Code Readability

Rob Conery pointed out an interesting comment on his IoC post: In this simplified example above you switched from 3 lines of easily understandable code to something that requires code in the global.asax, another couple classes, and an interface. The … Continue reading

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Do Bad Programmers Know About Technical Debt?

In short, no. But why am I asking the question in the first place? Well, much discussion in the technical blogs (such as the NOOP.NL Top 200) is centered around the idea about whether a mediocre programmer will land on … Continue reading

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Show, Don’t Tell

The title comes from the field of literature and art where writers (and movie directors) are rebuked for using narration (“he was sad”) instead of using actions and thoughts of a character to illustrate a situation. Much of the recent … Continue reading

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A Difference Between Indian and American Programmers

There are a lot of them, but I keep coming across one all the time. Here is an example (emphasis mine): Brad Fitzpatrick, born in 1980, started to learn programming at the age of 5. In high school he went … Continue reading

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The Legacy Programmer Boss

Daniel Auger defines a new term: The Legacy Programmer Boss is the manager who had a successful programming career in the past but sees many modern concepts as language baubles, academics, and anti-patterns because they are out of the loop. … Continue reading

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The Twin Demons of Programmers

Two somewhat conflicting needs of programmers: Write as little code as possible. Reduce coupling as much as possible. I wonder if they can ever be achieved together entirely, but one thing that seems to be happening is that Item (2) … Continue reading

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Natural Things To Do

I am an advocate of programmers starting their own blogs so that they can share their thoughts on programming and software development. But this is not necessarily a natural thing to do because writing is different from programming. The natural … Continue reading

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