Switch statements are often (and rightfully, in my opinion) considered to be a code smell. A code smell, if you’ll recall, is a superficial characteristic of code that is often indicative of deeper problems. It’s similar in concept to the term “red flag” for interpersonal relationships. A code smell is like someone you’ve just met…
Convene the High Council Today I’d like to talk about something that I’ve observed on some occasions throughout my career. It sort of builds on the concepts that I’ve touched on in previous writings “How to Keep your Best Programmers” and the Expert Beginner posts, including Bruce Webster’s “Dead Sea Effect.” The phenomenon is an…
Where the Message Gets Lost In Teaching TDD I recently answered a programmers’ stackexchange post about test-driven development. (As an aside, it will be cool when me linking to a SE question drives more traffic their way than them linking to me drives my way 🙂 ). As I’m wont to do, I said a…
On Being Deliberately Unclear For whatever reason lately, I’ve been drawing a lot of inspiration from Programmers’ Stack Exchange, and today brings another such post. However, unlike other questions, reading this one seriously made me sad. The questions, the answers, its existence… all of it made me sad in the same kind of way that…
In the last few months, I’ve seen a number of tweets and posts decrying or at least cautioning against the use of productivity tools (e.g. CodeRush, ReSharper, and JustCode). The reasoning behind this is is generally some variant of the notion that such tools are more akin to addictive drugs than to sustainable life improvements….
