OCG developers

"[..] I'm going to assert that something similar exists with regard to motivation, and examine six timeframes: minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years."

"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."

"This is the cone of uncertainty, a measure of the accuracy of our estimation of effort as we get closer to finishing work. Very close to finishing, we have a very good idea of how much is left. As we move away from the time to completion, the variance of our estimates increases drastically."

"All code can be classified into two distinct roles; code that does work (algorithms) and code that coordinates work (coordinators)."

"After a good discussion with a colleague for the merits of code review I thought I should give some of the reasons I use as to why a development team should adopt a code review process."

The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code Have you ever heard of SEMA? It's a fairly esoteric system for measuring how good a software team is. No, wait! Don't follow that link! It will take you about six years just to understand that stuff.

Imagine if we wanted to display a list of enums within a list, and we actually wanted to have more descriptive values, friendly names if you like, but still maintain the underlying enum value selected where required. This article will show you how to do the following, using WPF.

"Switching from developing ASP.NET WebForms to MVC might seem awkward at first, but Ed demonstrates why the change needn't be painful, and how best to build a set of tools for rapid MVC development."

"Recommendation: Go for the lightweight Factory Delegate approach. As with all patterns, use with caution and watch for overuse & abuse. In particular, if you need to manage state between multiple delegate, fall back to the overriding approach, because you can keep the state in the subclass."

"[..] what about inversion of control containers? There's a lot of confusion around what they do, and why you should use one at all. Every now and then I meet a developer, who says they read all the definitions, introductions and basic examples, and they still don't get why would they use a container."

"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."

"I've done a number of talks on Productivity in the past. Lots of folks ask me what my tips are for being productive. I've taken all those tips as well as tips from Kathy Sierra, Stephen Covey, David Allen, The Pomodoro Technique and many more and aggregated them into a system that works well for me. I talk about how to effectively handle large amounts email, sorting your personal data stream, how to conserve your keystrokes, the "one email rule" that you need to be effective"

"the most important guideline is to watch for warning signs in your own code-- so called "code smells". Developing your "code nose" is something that happens early in your programming career, if it's going to happen at all. I combined all the documented code smells I could find into this reference; most of these smells should be familiar to you."

"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."

"[..] the reason I have done all this work is my very strong belief that TDD as a practice has a large amount of value well beyond what most people understand. In fact, I believe that of all the practices made popular by the agile movement, TDD is the most beneficial practice overall. Here are eight reasons why I believe that TDD should be beyond debate."

"When Eric Schmidt makes grand pronouncements about the industry, he's probably not just blowing smoke. You should listen to him. And when he repeated his claim, during an interview this week with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, that the tech world is ruled by just four giants-Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook-Schmidt was right on."

"Even with the rise of cloud computing, the world still revolves around servers. That won't last, though. Cloud apps are moving into a serverless world, and that will big implications for the creation and distribution of software and applications."