A message appeared recently on the SVG Development mailing list that, once again, predicts the death of SVG. This meme comes up pretty regularly on the various mailing lists for SVG. Most of them are trolls, of course. But this one got me thinking again about what SVG is and what it is not. I… Read More »
I recently been studying software architecture and have had a minor epiphany. My assumptions about code complexity may have been unnecessarily pessimistic. From my experiences in software development, I have observed that more powerful or more robust systems are naturally more complex. A side effect of this observation is that beginning to do development on… Read More »
I was reading The JavaScript Phrasebook on Safari and ran across one of my favorite pet peeves when people write about Web technologies. Cookies are not a specific browser technology, but a mechanism in the client/server model to overcome one major shortcoming in the HTTP protocol. HTTP is stateless, which means that the protocol does… Read More »
The Productive Programmer Neal Ford O’Reilly, 2008 When I found out about this book, I knew I had to read it. I have been a programmer for a long time and I’m always on the lookout for tips about how to become more productive. I expected a list of tricks that would make individual development… Read More »
Yesterday, I wrote an essay on a comment made in Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horrors blog about regular expressions. While Atwood spends quite a bit of time on the two problems joke and talks passionately about regexes as a tool, he does take a swipe at the Perl programming language that seemed somewhat uncalled for. I… Read More »
Jeff Atwood had an interesting post on regular expressions a few days ago. Most of the article talks passionately about the usefulness of regular expressions, strategies for writing readable regular expressions, and tools to help write and debug regular expressions. Along the way, Jeff points out a comment that usually pops up when the topic… Read More »
There is a technique I have seen used many times in my career called Lazy Initialization. The purpose of this technique is to delay an expensive initialization (or object construction, or calculation) until you actually need it. Just like any technique, Lazy Initialization has both advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are a pretty obvious: If… Read More »
Beautiful Code Edited by Andy Oram & Greg Wilson O’Reilly, 2007 Although I was really looking forward to reading Beautiful Code when I first heard it was coming out, I found myself a bit disappointed by the reality of the book. Each chapter is written by a different master coders, giving their views on what… Read More »
Long ago, I was trying to convince a friend of mine that Object Oriented programming was not all just snake oil when he asked me a fundamental question. What’s the difference between an object and a thingie? In some ways, this question has guided my understanding of objects ever since. Fundamentally, what makes one collection… Read More »
Continuing the line of thought from last time (Sharp Tools vs. Frameworks), another issue I see in quite a few frameworks and some systems is a code anti-pattern I’ll call The Modular Monolith. We all know that modularity is a good thing to have in a system. Modular code, in general, reduces coupling between components,… Read More »