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.
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.
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.
In Praise of Non-Alphanumeric IdentifiersOne of my favorite non-alphanumeric characters for function names is "?". Why say is_uppercase (or IsUppercase or isUppercase) when you can use the more straightforward Uppercase? instead? That's standard practice in Scheme and Forth, and I'm surprised it hasn't caught on in all new languages.
IE 11 to Feature WebGL, New Development Tools and SPDYThere is good news for web developers: Windows 8.1 will ship with Internet Explorer 11, which will feature WebGL, much improved developer's tools and support for Google's SPDY protocol.
Not handling edge cases, making them explicit insteadWhen I wrote about accidental entities earlier, we followed a consultant building software for a car rental company. In the meanwhile, he has finished implementing the registration of new cars. Next on the list is allowing customers to make a booking.
@FredKSchott's Blog : Why Facebook's Recent Data Leak is Worse Than You ThinkYesterday, Facebook announced the accidental release of 6 million users’ personal information. The source of the leak was their Backup Tool, which lets users download their list of friends complete with any information they’d chosen to share.
Dirty Game Development TricksThe article is being highlighted as one of Gamasutra's best stories of 2013. This trick was on the PS3: We on the Insomniac engine team had some textures that we wanted distributed with our engine/tools release. These were things like noise textures and source input for full-screen filter effects.
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.