Group items tagged

"I often hear people say something like "if you need it once, build it. If you need it twice, abstract it." People often say then in the context of the "DRY" - or Don't Repeat Yourself - principle. [..] The idea of DRY needs to be tempered with YAGNI - "You Aint Gonna Need It". With that, we end up with The Rule Of Three, and it clearly says that code can be copied once but the third time you need it, you should abstract it."

"I want to look at some of the costs of unit testing and ask the question "why is unit testing hard?" After all, if unit testing weren't hard, we wouldn't have to question whether or not it was worth it.  It makes sense then to look at first why it is hard and what makes it hard."

"Have you ever seen code that looked like the snippet here? [..] You probably have seen code like this, and I hope that it makes you sad. I know it makes me sad. It makes me sad because it's clearly the result of a fundamental failure to understand (or at least implement) polymorphism."

"LinkedIn has just passed 175 million registered users and is widely recognized to be the most successful business-oriented social media networking site in the world. So why haven't more people - especially IT pros -  figured out how to maximize its features and make it a tool that effectively builds relationships with their peers and attracts appropriate employment options?"

The Microsoft .NET platform, originally introduced in 2002, is mature and it provides developers with great options for creating software that can meet the requirements of any project. With many options, though, it can be difficult for today's .NET developer to choose the correct .NET technologies for a project. Addressing this problem, Telerik has assembled its senior technical leaders to produce the Microsoft Platform Guidance 2012. This document attempts to provide prescriptive guidance for .NET developers trying to determine the best .NET technologies to use for specific software challenges.

"When you really boil it down to its implementation, FizzBuzz is something of an irritating program. I'm not sure how much the author of the problem really thought about FizzBuzz, but it turns out it's difficult to express well with the tools available to most imperative programming languages and easy to express using functional patterns available in Haskell and ML."

"Does your company let you work from wherever you want? If it doesn't, it may be watching as progress passes it by. The next generation of working doesn't require a desk."

Apple's new MacBook Pro follows the fine tradition of the iPhone 4 and third-gen iPad in that it has a super high-resolution Retina display: a 2880 x 1800 panel with an amazing 220 pixels packed in per inch. It's an incredible display. In fact, it's such an incredible display that it actually has about one million, seven hundred thousand pixels more than it needs to satisfy Apple's definition of Retina, leading some to claim that those pixels are all going to waste. Nothing could be further from the truth.

"It is common for a single parent entity to be related to many child entities. This relationship may be required or optional. A  required relationship means that the child cannot exist without a parent, and if the parent is deleted or the relationship between the child and the parent is severed, then the child becomes orphaned. In such situations it is often useful to have the orphaned child automatically deleted."

"With this post, based solely on my own opinion, I wanted to give those people the simple yes or no answer to their question, and here it is: "Is Silverlight dead 2012?" Yes, it is. IF and ONLY IF your target is Joe Blow playing FarmVille on his iPad while watching "[YourCountryHere] got talent"."

"Despite IDisposable having only a single method named Dispose to implement, it is commonly implemented incorrectly. After reading this blog post it should be clear how and when to implement IDisposable, as well as how to ensure that resources are properly disposed when bad things happen (also knows as exceptions)."

"The greatest advantage that JetBrains ReSharper provides is that it makes the improving process much cheaper. How it is done? By simplifying both of the improvement steps: Understanding the code - ReSharper provides very quick and simple navigation along with immediate usage information. Changing the code - ReSharper provides extensive refactoring options. Most of the known refactoring techniques are built-in."

"Service Locator is a well-known pattern, and since it was described by Martin Fowler, it must be good, right? No, it's actually an anti-pattern and should be avoided."

"Asynchrony is essential  for scalability and performance on the server side. Although it has always been possible to write asynchronous code, there has, up to now, been a downside: it is difficult to understand and maintain. Now, with the async/await. keywords, the whole approach is radically simplified for the programmer."

"Behind every Google Map, there is a much more complex map that's the key to your queries but hidden from your view. The deep map contains the logic of places: their no-left-turns and freeway on-ramps, speed limits and traffic conditions."

In general, developers do not like to give presentations. In fact, they dread it. This is unfortunate because presentations can be a powerful asset. Most individuals cannot survive a long career without presenting on occasion. Others may have the courage but lack the proper guidance to present effectively. Whatever the circumstance, developing good presentation skills is easier than learning a new technology. The process rarely changes. Learn it once and reap the benefits. 

Roy Fielding writes a PhD dissertation describing the architectural style of the World Wide Web. He coins the term 'Representational State Transfer' (REST) to describe it - after all, if you're going to talk about something, you need to give it a name. Somehow, in a semantic shift of epic fail proportions, the term REST has also come to mean something completely different to most people, a 'style' of writing web services. This style has no agreed protocol.

"The below 11 points are what I have learnt via projects, my own experiences, and my own reading. I personally think it has helped me a lot when it comes to DB designing."

The advent of the many-core era is not going to push developers to write more parallel code. That hasn't happened as we've gone from 1- to 2- to 4- to 8-core processors, has it? Writing parallel code is not the problem. So, let's stop trying to fix it.

Git is the source code version control system that is rapidly becoming the standard for open source projects. It has a powerful distributed model which allows advanced users to do tricky things with branches, and rewriting history. What a pity that it's so hard to learn, has such an unpleasant command line interface, and treats its users with such utter contempt.