Archive for the ‘Misc. programming’ Category

Getting answers from Experts-Exchange.com

If your search for answers to technical questions yield links to Experts Exchange, you’ll probably find yourself frustrated by the “This answer is only available for Premium Members” blocks. However, it’s good to know that the content really is freely available. This popped up again today, so it’s worth a heads-up. The whole issue has, […]

June 29, 2009 · Jouni Heikniemi · 2 Comments
Posted in: Misc. programming

Why CS students should do TDD

If you are a Computer Science student, take heed: When you're about to take on an assignment that takes more than two hours to implement, do Test-Driven Development. (that doesn't mean you couldn't use TDD in smaller assignments if you feel like it) First of all, what is TDD? It is a philosophy that encourages you […]

October 29, 2006 · Jouni Heikniemi · Comments Closed
Posted in: Misc. programming

Refactorability is not an excuse for bad code

According to Wikipedia, "Refactoring is the process of rewriting a computer program or other material to improve its structure or readability, while explicitly preserving its meaning or behavior". Since the agile culture emphasizes refactoring of the code as necessary, it does set a new stage for code quality demands: How relevant is the initial quality of […]

September 20, 2006 · Jouni Heikniemi · Comments Closed
Posted in: Misc. programming

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