I see a lot of development advice that assumes the developer is working on a green field application. Many of the tools that “make a developer’s life easier” are also designed mostly for use in creating new applications. Most of my experience as a professional developer (or whichever title you prefer) has been improving and… Read More »
Over the years I have noticed a habit among some developers that I’ve come to call Aphorism Driven Development. Many best practices are taught and remembered through the use pithy statements. Although these statements are easy to remember, they can’t capture the full context and connotations of the practice in question. If someone never learns… Read More »
For the last several years, programmers keep choosing Rust as their favorite language. I haven’t seen a whole lot of explanation of why. After a conversation with my manager, I realized that my reasons might be quite a bit different than others. Why Learn a New Programming Language? One of my favorite computer science quotes… Read More »
Let’s say we are writing some code to retrieve data from a database. If the data we are looking for is there, we can obviously return it. If there is no data that matches our search, we need to signal that we did not find it. In many languages, we use a nil, null, or… Read More »
In the previous post, I covered a quick overview of error handling approaches in different languages. Then, I introduced Rust’s error handling using the Result<T, E> enum. This time we’ll look at how Rust’s approach improves on other techniques. Compared to Error Returns Returning a Result<T, E> from a function is very much like the… Read More »
For the last couple of years, I’ve been learning Rust in my free time (ha!) by working on side projects. Since I don’t really have a deadline, I can focus on seeing how Rust changes the way I think about programming. A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming is not worth… Read More »
Any solution to a problem involves trade-offs. One of my managers a long time ago used to be fond of saying some variation of There are an infinite number of solutions to a problem. A subset of those will work. A subset of those will work well. A subset of those are actually worth doing.… Read More »
A recent article ‘Real’ Programming Is an Elitist Myth hit a couple of points that I have been explaining to people for years. Although the author makes a few interesting points, he misses several more. The author describes a system written using a “database as a service” system with little to no code, that solves… Read More »
Git makes working with branches extremely easy. Especially compared to many of the version control systems that came before it. This has resulted in a standard workflow involving feature branches. The idea is to branch from master when you begin developing a new feature. You do all of your development on that branch. When the… Read More »
If you work as a developer, you probably spend a large amount of time in your editor. You are adding features, improving tests, looking for bugs, reviewing changes, and otherwise looking at the code. When I started programming, screens were a lot smaller and almost no one had space on their desk for more than… Read More »