Category Archives: Programming

More Good Programming Quotes, Part 3

Posted on April 3, 2019 | 1 comment

I like good programming quotes. Here are some new ones I have found since my last posts.

Complexity

“Why do people find DNS so difficult? It’s just cache invalidation and naming things.” – @jdu Continue reading →

1 Comment

Posted in Programming

Tagged

Programming: Math or Writing?

Posted on March 30, 2019 | 3 comments

Is programming like math, or is it like writing? I think there are elements of both in it, even though programming is a discipline of its own. Nevertheless, it is interesting to think about what aspects are like math, and what aspects are like writing. Maybe it will even lead to a better understanding of what programming is.

Like Math

Continue reading →

3 Comments

Posted in Programming

Tagged , ,

6 Git Aha Moments

Posted on June 25, 2018 | 24 comments

When I switched jobs four years ago, I went from using subversion (svn) to using git as the version control system. Even though I am a pretty quick learner, it took me a quite a while to really understand git. I read a lot on how git works, but even so, I didn’t always realize what the implications were for how to use git. Here are six big “aha moments” I had on how to use git. Continue reading →

24 Comments

Posted in Learning, Programming

Tagged

Exercises in Programming Style

Posted on March 13, 2018 | 6 comments

In the book club at work, we recently finished reading Exercises in Programming Style by Cristina Videira Lopes. The book consists of a simple program implemented in 33 different programming styles. It is a great way of showing the different styles, and the book was quite popular in the book club. The book is relatively new (it was published in 2014), and I don’t think it is as well-known as it deserves to be. So here is a summary and review of it. Continue reading →

6 Comments

Posted in Learning, Programming

Tagged , , ,

Programming for Grade 8

Posted on December 17, 2017 | 11 comments

For the past two months, I have been helping my son’s grade 8 class to learn to program. All students wrote Python programs and got a feel for what programming is. This post has details on how we organized the course, code examples and lessons learned. Continue reading →

11 Comments

Posted in Learning, Programming

Tagged , , , , ,

More Good Programming Quotes, Part 2

Posted on September 16, 2017 | 4 comments

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 →

4 Comments

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 , , , ,