I recently traded in my car for a new one, only to take the new car home and have it completely dead in my garage the next day; I couldn’t crank the engine or anything. I had it towed back to the dealer. The dealer replaced the battery which they said had “gone bad” and [...]
A big part of software development is making hard problems into easy problems, but sometimes it’s essential for your sanity to work on easy problems that you know how to solve. I call this “going for the easy win” or sometimes “picking the low-hanging fruit.” While it might give you a lot of bragging rights [...]
One of the compound constructs that exists in virtually all programming languages is the if-elseif-elseif-…-else block. Nearly every language in use today (except for the most esoteric) has this kind of statement. Some have a fancier, souped up version like switch in C/C++/C#/Java, match in OCAML or case in Haskell, but the basic idea is [...]
There’s an old saw about software documentation:
Documentation is like sex; when it’s good, it’s very, very good, and when it’s bad, it’s better than nothing. –Dick Brandon
Clever quip, to be sure, but it glosses over a big time-sink that maintenance programmers (read: all programmers) have to contend with: wasting time believing in misleading or [...]
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