This post examines the advantages and disadvantages of defensive coding. "It seems the prevailing mood in my team is to not have any of the checks and just let it fail. To be honest I’m struggling with this concept as I am so used to developing in this way and thought it was good practice.
Don’t Treat Paths Like StringsFile paths are represented by strings, but they don’t act like strings. People often manipulate paths by using simple string operations, but this is a mistake.
The Architecture Twitter Uses to Deal with 150M Active Users, 300K QPS, a 22 MB/S Firehose, and Send Tweets in Under 5 SecondsToy solutions solving Twitter’s “problems” are a favorite scalability trope. Everybody has this idea that Twitter is easy. With a little architectural hand waving we have a scalable Twitter, just that simple.
Born slippy: the making of Star FoxEvery Sunday we take a stroll through our archives in order to reintroduce to a piece from our past. Today, in the wake of Nintendo's mini-revival of Starfox with Shigeru Miyamoto's Wii U experiment, we bring you Damien McFerran's making of the SNES original.
The Strange Story of Dual_EC_DRBGRandom numbers are critical for cryptography: for encryption keys, random authentication challenges, initialization vectors, nonces, key-agreement schemes, generating prime numbers and so on. Break the random-number generator, and most of the time you break the entire security system.
What really happened to the software on the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft?It’s the 4th of July. Exactly sixteen years ago today the Mars Pathfinder landed to a media fanfare and began to transmit data back to Earth. Days later and the flow of information and images was interrupted by a series of total systems resets.
What's in a Good Commit?Let's begin with a horror story. You hear that issue FOO-123 has been fixed. The bug had something to do with a subsystem you know well, so you have your own hunch about what might have caused it. To confirm your suspicion, you decide to take a look at how the bug was fixed.
on Legacy CodeA few weeks ago I started wondering about 'the test that occasionally and randomly breaks' in a large test suite at my job.
Why I’m not paying the Troll TollMy company TMSOFT was recently sued by Lodsys in the eastern district of Texas. I initially thought I was being sued for using a hyperlink in my White Noise application (see below). I know now I’m being sued because the CEO of Lodsys didn’t like what I publicly said about their company.
This Read-It-Later-list is just that, bookmarks of stuff I intend to read or have read. I do not necessarily agree with opinions or statements in the bookmarked articles.
This list is compiled from my Pocket list.