Category Archives: Programming

More Good Programming Quotes, Part 2

Posted on September 16, 2017 | 1 comment

A good programming quote captures an insight about programming, often in a funny way. Many quotes are quite famous, but I like ones that are a bit less well-know. A while ago, I listed some favorites. Here are more good quotes I have found since then. Enjoy! Continue reading →

1 Comment

Posted in Programming

Tagged

Developer Testing

Posted on August 20, 2017 | 3 comments

I recently found out about the book Developer Testing – Building Quality Into Software by Alexander Tarlinder, and I immediately wanted to read it. Even though I am a developer at heart, I have always been interested in software testing (I even worked as a tester for two years).

I think the subject of the book, developer testing, is timely. There seems to be a broad trend where more and more responsibility for testing is given to developers. It follows from the move towards micro services, dev ops and the “you built it, you run it” principle. Another driving force is the prevalence of developer testing frameworks that started with JUnit and now includes many more. These frameworks encourage and help developers write automatic tests.

Despite this trend of increasing developer testing, my feeling is that many developers still don’t test their programs well enough. For example, they may test the “happy path”, but not the different error handling cases. That is why I was excited about this new book explicitly addressing developer testing. Continue reading →

3 Comments

Posted in Programming, Testing

Tagged , , , ,

Code Rot

Posted on April 28, 2017 | 5 comments

In my experience, code can rot in two distinct ways. The first case is code that hasn’t been used in a long time, but where the environment has changed so it is no longer possible to run the code. In the second case, the code still works, but has gradually become complicated and hard to work with. The first case is unusual, but straight forward to fix. The second case is very common, but unfortunately hard to fix if left for too long.

Continue reading →

5 Comments

Posted in Programming

Tagged , ,

Software Development and the Gig Economy

Posted on January 22, 2017 | 4 comments

These days it is common to hear arguments that software development is becoming gig based. In other words, companies will not hire programmers for permanent positions. Instead, they will put together temporary teams of independent contractors from anywhere in the world to complete projects.

This is no doubt true for some software development tasks. However, for companies whose core product is software, this model makes very little sense.dsc_0244 Continue reading →

4 Comments

Posted in Programming, Work

Tagged ,

Book Review: The Effective Engineer

Posted on January 15, 2017 | 2 comments

Last month we finished reading “The Effective Engineer” by Edmond Lau in the book club at work. It is a great book full of practical advice on how to get more done as a software developer. In fact, it is one of the three books I think all programmers would benefit from reading (the other two are Code Complete and The Pragmatic Programmer).

dsc_2507

Continue reading →

2 Comments

Posted in Learning, Programming, Work

Tagged ,

Things Programmers Say

Posted on November 24, 2016 | 1 comment

Recently @ThePracticalDev asked people on Twitter for typical things programmers say:

There were a lot of great answers. Here are my favorites: Continue reading →

1 Comment

Posted in Programming

Tagged , , ,

Book Review: Release It!

Posted on October 27, 2016 | Leave a comment

In the book club at work, we recently finished reading Release It! by Michael T. Nygard. It is a book I have been meaning to read for a long time, but somehow I never got around to it until now. It was written in 2007, and it is starting to show its age in several respects.  Despite this, there is still a lot of relevant advice on how to make software work well in production.

dsc_1578

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Posted in Debugging, Learning, Programming

Tagged ,