December 2005 Blog Posts
So a contact of mine through this blog commented on the success of Codebetter today with our nice new visual appeal and ever increasing subscriber and visitor ratios. He also followed up with a probing question on what we will be up to in the future. The answer of course is to stay focused on quality content since that is what got us to where we are today and we are always looking to increase our readership.
Interestingly enough this person asked whether we had considered doing some for profit activities like collaberating on a book, software, services, etc. It's probably...
Here's something I see time and time again from new entrants to the
OO world in .NET. If you want to make your code more stable,
reliable, and extensible in certain aspects of enterprise systems you
must embrace the concepts of coding to interfaces, not inheritance to
keep yourself from digging into a nightmare down the road. To
better explain what I'm talking about, here's a very simple example to
help show the concept:
Let's say you have a system with a method that performs a
calculation. What the calculation is doesn't really matter, it
could be a sales tax calc, or anything really. The important
point is that currently...
Someone from the Joel forums asked how useful GPA is as a hiring metric for developers. I was interested enough that I decided to blog my response:
I had my first hiring company request a transcript, once I had > 1 yr experience no one has ever asked again. It does make sense that companies are more interested in what you can do, versus what classes you took in college.What do good grades tell you?1. You show up to class (meet committments and deadlines)2. You can follow directions.3. You can adapt to the style of a teacher/boss/peer.What don't grades tell you?1....
One thing I often get questions about from friends and coworkers is how to gracefully exit their positions (or handle a position that is falling apart, ie leaving on "bad terms"). So here's some thoughts on the termination process.
How much notice do I give?
As much or as little as you feel comfortable with. Employers like to tout the "2 weeks notice" as the defacto standard but frankly the majority of states have this whole legal policy that says an employer can terminate you at any time for no reason whatsoever. So frankly if employers are willing to toss you on...
One of my major goals when embarking on a development project is to
structure the application such that the code documents itself.
Does this mean that I don't comment my code? Of course not!
But I find that if you take on development tasks with the mindset of
"Could a developer with nothing but a business requirements document
work in this environment semi-effectively if all of my comments
vanished?" you would be amazed at the impact it has on your coding
style.
That being said, the biggest concept of self documenting code comes
down to naming. There are two rules of thumb to self documenting
code in this aspect:
If it...