Archive for the ‘Misc. programming’ Category

Why writing truly international software is hard

You cannot trust a thing. Forget intuition. As I recently posted, you can't just go about thinking every date value is representable under the current culture. Well, there's a lot more, and I'm learning some of it the hard way. You just cannot assume a case-insensitive comparison between "bit" and "BIT" would be true. "What?" [...]

September 27, 2005 · Jouni Heikniemi · Comments Closed
Posted in: Misc. programming

Bound to release or just vanish?

Black hole projects versus teams with proper discipline – which one does your organization belong to?

June 29, 2005 · Jouni Heikniemi · Comments Closed
Posted in: Misc. programming

Why OO patterns are not for the weak

The standard mantra for many programming evangelists is "use design patterns, they combine the wisdom of years for you to use" (in case you don't know what patterns are, read the Wikipedia article). Some of my recent adventures into the patterns world have convinced me that while patterns do contain much wisdom, they are not [...]

June 3, 2005 · Jouni Heikniemi · Comments Closed
Posted in: Misc. programming

Localizing linked images in Word (and horrible interfaces)

A couple of weeks back, I was struggling with a set of Word documents that had external links to images (equivalent to the HTML img element). I desperately needed to get the image links broken and the binary image data included in the document. There were thousands of documents, so an automated solution was required. [...]

April 16, 2005 · Jouni Heikniemi · Comments Closed
Posted in: Misc. programming

Code quality, part IV: Nameless abstractions are just complexity

I recently bumped into this: foreach my $module ( grep( !/^Perl$/, $installed->modules() ) ) { if ($module =~ /DBD::(.*)$/) { $installed_DBD_modules{lc($1)} = 1; } } For the non-perl-literate ones: The code block runs through the list of Perl's external code modules and collects the names of installed database drivers into a hash table. We now [...]

April 10, 2005 · Jouni Heikniemi · One Comment
Posted in: Misc. programming

How to acquaint yourself with masses of code?

During the last few months, I've been delving into a huge lump of source code, trying to understand its structure and come up with ways to make the application more structured and expandable. I'm blessed: the code itself is actually rather decent, although the passage of time has certainly deteriorated the structure somewhat (this happens [...]

March 25, 2005 · Jouni Heikniemi · One Comment
Posted in: Misc. programming

Domain specific languages

A colleague of mine pointed me at the presentation slides of Microsoft Architecture Days held during my holiday. Of particular interest for me was the presentation on Domain Specific Languages (DSL). The slides are in English, but the presentation itself (available as a video clip) is in Finnish. Although I had heard of DSL before, [...]

March 12, 2005 · Jouni Heikniemi · Comments Closed
Posted in: Misc. programming

Software development as a lifelong career?

Douglas Reilly recently posted an article called The value of experienced coders discussing the merits of experience and the short-sighted approach of pushing experienced developers either to sales or management. A rather interesting read, and luckily quite a bit shorter than my usual recommendations :-) Not that I'd be close to even 40 yet, but [...]

February 21, 2005 · Jouni Heikniemi · 4 Comments
Posted in: Misc. programming

An excellent unit testing article

While I've been exploring in the unit testing world for quite some time already, the recent weeks have been another great push in this direction. The techniques and patterns for unit testing are relatively easy to comprehend. My real challenge is business integration and managing the developer-driven part of the testing process: The ways to [...]

February 16, 2005 · Jouni Heikniemi · Comments Closed
Posted in: Misc. programming

Code quality, part II: Proper exception handling

One critical part in good-quality code is the way it handles errors. Error handling is very rarely fun to write, but nevertheless, it's one of the things that your code gets judged by. Or, rather: proper error handling rarely gets praise from the end user, but the lack of one causes lots of irritation. The [...]

January 1, 2005 · Jouni Heikniemi · 2 Comments
Posted in: Misc. programming