If peppering your code with lots of comments is good, then having zillions of comments in your code must be great, right? Not quite. Excess is one way good comments go bad [https://blog.codinghorror.com/when-good-comments-go-bad/]: '************************************************* ' Name: CopyString ' ' Purpose: This routine copies a string from
In previous posts, I've talked about building your own desktop PC, and building your own home theater PC. I'm still very much in love with that little HTPC I built. Not only does it have a modern dual-core CPU, and fantastic high-definition capable integrated video --
As we work with ASP.NET MVC on Stack Overflow, I find myself violently thrust back into the bad old days of tag soup that I remember from my tenure as a classic ASP developer in the late 90's. If you're not careful bordering on manically
Robert Miesen sent in this story of a project pathology: I was part of a team writing an web-based job application and screening system (a job kiosk the customer called it) and my team and our customer signed on to implementing this job kiosk using Windows, Apache, PHP5, and the
Some developers love to gold plate their software. There are various shades of .. er, gold, I guess, but it's usually considered wasteful to fritter away time gold plating old code in the face of new features that need to be implemented, or old bugs that could be squashed.
One of the items we're struggling with now on Stack Overflow is how to maintain near-instantaneous performance levels in a relational database as the amount of data increases. More specifically, how to scale our tagging system. Traditional database design principles tell you that well-designed databases are always normalized,
Although I love strings, sometimes the String class can break your heart. For example, in C#, there is no String.Left() function. Fair enough; we can roll up our sleeves and write our own function lickety-split: public static string Left(string s, int len) { if (len == 0 || s.Length == 0)
Ever find yourself clicking on links to music or videos and getting blasted in the face with this delightful little number? That's right -- links to any sort of music, TV shows, movies, podcasts, audiobooks or anything else available through Apple's iTunes store requires custom software
As I grow older and wisereven older as a programmer, I've found that my personal coding style has trended heavily toward minimalism. I was pleased, then, to find many of the coding conventions I've settled on over the last 20 years codified in Spartan programming. No,
When you join a team, it's important to bend your preferences a little to accommodate the generally accepted coding practices of that team. Not everyone has to agree on every miniscule detail of the code, of course, but it's a good idea to dicuss it with
In A Developer's Second Most Important Asset [https://blog.codinghorror.com/a-developers-second-most-important-asset/], I described how buying a quality chair may be one of the smartest investments you can make as a software developer. > In fact, after browsing chairs for the last few years of my career, I&
In Codeplex wastes six months reinventing wheels, Ryan Davis has a bone to pick with Microsoft: I saw an announcement [in March, 2007] that CodePlex, Microsoft's version of Sourceforge, has released a source control client. This infuriates me. This cool thing they spent six months (six!) writing is