Month: January 2009
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Splitting a String in Perl
A user recently asked: How do I take a string in Perl and split it up into an array with entries two characters long each? Ultimately I want to turn something like this F53CBBA476 into and array containing F5 3C BB A4 76 This was my answer: @array = ( $string =~ m/../g ); The…
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Understanding Unfamiliar Databases
A user recently asked: What kind of approaches and techniques can you employ to become familiar with an existing database if you are tasked with supporting and/or modifying it? How can you easily and effectively ramp up your knowledge of a database you have never seen before? Here was my reply: The first thing I…
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Why Should You Use an ORM?
A user recently asked for good arguments in favor of using Object/Relational Mapping technology: If you were to motivate [sic] the “pro’s” of why you would use an ORM to management/client, what would the reasons be? Try and keep one reason per answer so that we can see what gets voted up as the best…
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Is This Legal?
A user recently asked a question about GPL compatibility with his company’s commercial software offerings: I work for a software / design firm and I recently found out that our “in house” CMS is actually [based on software] licensed under the GPL Ver 2. I would like to know if it is ethical / legal…
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Learn to Program in 21 Days
A user recently asked: Has anyone “learned how to program in 21 days?” I’m not a fan of these learn how to program in X amount of days books. Some even boast, learn how to program in 24 hours. This is a joke and an insult to me as a software engineer who went through…
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Best. Perl Script. Ever.
A user recently asked: What has been your best programming experience so far? The most successful program I’ve ever written was this Perl script: map(($r=$_,map(($y=$r-$_/3,$l[24-$r] .=(‘ ‘,’@’)[$y**2-20*$y+($_**2)/3<0]),(0..30)),),(0..24)); print join(“\n”, map(reverse($_).$_, @l)), “\n”; I wrote this for a woman I was dating in 2001. Writing a Perl script for my girlfriend is not as geeky as…
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The Next-Gen Databases
A user recently asked: I’m learning traditional Relational Databases (with PostgreSQL) and doing some research I’ve come across some new types of databases. CouchDB, Drizzle, and Scalaris to name a few, what is going to be the next database technologies to deal with? SQL is a language for querying and manipulating relational databases. SQL is…
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Verifying a Company Uses Best Practices
A user recently asked how to use the Joel Test in an interview, to confirm that a software company practices what they preach with regard to professional software development habits: I’ve got an interview with a company that claims to score a 12 on the Joel Test. […] What are some ways of determining if…
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Do I really need version control?
A user recently asked: I read all over the internet (various sites and blogs) about version control. How great it is and how all developer NEED to use it because is a god bless. Here is the question: do I really need this? … I usually work alone (freelancer) and I had no client that…