Since I’m having trouble producing full-length articles at the moment, I thought I’d try a different track to at least get some value out of my blog hosting costs. I’ll try to post a handful of links that have caught my attention each week.
In this article I link to two excellent articles on the subject of hiring coders. They’re not new by any means, but if you haven’t read one or both of them, I thoroughly recommend them. (If you’re familiar with both these writers, then skip this article.)
One of the “anti-patterns” I come across from time to time is over-use of enumerations for control flow. This article describes why I consider it an anti-pattern, and how to counteract it.
Since I “work with computers” I tend to get asked to do fair amount of unofficial technical support for family and neighbours. I’ve noticed that the same confusions about IT crop up again and again. Here’s my top ten.
One thing I was told as a young programmer was to make good use of assertions for checking code. As time goes by however, I can see less and less use for assertions. I’m starting to think they’re pretty useless.
You’ve been a coder for a few years now, maybe even decades. You’ve got a successful job, making enough money. You know the “respectable” technologies that the recruiters look for: C++, C#, Java, whatever. There’s no need to learn anything new. Stay in your comfort zone. Take it from these guys:
Out of the box, Visual Studio uses the Courier New font for displaying code. While that’s an acceptable font for programming, it’s hardly modern or easy on the eye. Did you know that Microsoft supply a much more readable alternative, for free?
I don’t pretend to like Internet Explorer 6 – in fact quite the reverse – it makes me boiling mad that web developers still have to support an ancient browser. The sooner we can get rid of it, the better. So here’s my little idea…
I’d heard of Windows Live Mesh previously, but not really looked into it before. Since we’re trying to improve our backup systems at the moment, I thought I’d give it a whirl and see what it can do for us.
I spotted a question over on StackOverflow the other day that piqued my interest – “How do you handle scheduling/deadlines around programmers?” – and I thought I’d note down my thoughts since I’ve noticed that a lot of people either confuse deadlines with estimates, or feel there’s some sort of battle between programmers and managers.
