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.
As time goes by, things go wrong with any body of code: we get lazy, bad developers contribute code, the original clean architecture gets forgotten, and so forth. Some bad code is easy to spot: it simply “smells” – once you see it, you know it’s bad. Refactoring this sort of code to remove the [...]
There’s been a bit of discussion about my last article, “LINQ-to-Entities: The Blackberry Storm of ORMs?“. I thought I’d try to clear up a bit of what I was trying to say, especially with regards my statement about LINQ-to-Entities returning differing values depending on code order.
(In case you missed the reference, the new Blackberry Storm has been widely slammed as an inferior copy of the iPhone, and was released basically unfinished to try to fend off its better rival). Note: the first part of this article is a bit of an opinionated rant – if you want to skip to [...]
I’ve finally bitten the bullet and spent half an hour creating a new theme for this blog. The main content is wider; The code blocks are 50% bigger and hence easier to read; The header image is smaller so it won’t decimate my bandwidth limit; The page now looks more modern and fresh. What’s with [...]
The response to my last article (Ten Web Development Tips I Wish I’d Known Two Years Ago) has been a bit… surprising. It’s been viewed 75,000 times so far, wiping out my 3Gb monthly bandwidth allowance in less than a week. (I’ve paid for extra bandwidth now). I’ve received an unprecedented number of comments – [...]
A couple of years ago I started doing more and more web development and web design, and less and less desktop development. Here’s a few things I wish I’d known then: 1. Use a Reset Stylesheet Different browsers are free to set default styles for font sizes, margins, and so forth. It’s a silly part [...]
Let’s start with a quick quiz. What do the following completely made-up lines of code do?: thing.SetIsVisible( true ); thing.SetVisibile( true ); var item = factory.CreateThing( true ); Although they’re made-up, they could just as easily not be. When you jump into someone else’s code for the first time, all the code might as well [...]
It’s been a manic month here at BinaryComponents – we’ve finally released our latest web application – http://www.easyas123web.com – blatant plug there – and of course there’s still a ton of work to be done on it. It’s times like these that make me wish I had a team of ten, to make progress through [...]
I stumbled across a really nice article the other day: Introduction to Abject-Oriented Programming Judging by the comments posted, only about 50% of people even realize it’s a joke – it’s worth reading through them for a second laugh. Some notable quotes: “Programs that use inheritance are characterized by similar blocks of code with small [...]
