Keeping It Simple
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Quantity Over Quality
Alex Netkachov recently reported a list of micro-optimizations for PHP. Several other bloggers (Sebastian, Maggie, Pádraic) responded with appropriate messages, reminding people that proper application design usually counts more than micro-optimizations. They are all correct. When I was an intern, I emailed a C compiler developer, to ask a question that had occurred to me…
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Accepting a job that failed The Joel Test
A user recently asked: I’m about to accept a job offer for a company that has failed The Joel Test with flying colors. Now, my question is how do I improve the conditions there. I am positive that within a few months I will be able to make a difference. But where do I start?…
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Unit Test Coverage
S.Lott writes in his blog about unit test code-coverage: how much is enough? Effective tests should account not only for code paths, but also input values and other application state or external environment that may affect the behavior. For example, it may be easy to get 100% code coverage from tests for a function like…
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How Do You Reward Good Clients?
A user recently asked: I find when I get a ‘good client’ things go so much smoother on a project (there even seems to be less bugs – weird?). I have a habit of rewarding good behavior from anyone (even if its just a simple thank you). I am interested to know what sort of…
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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…
Got any book recommendations?