Cargo Cults and Angry Monkeys If you have never heard the term “Cargo Cult Programming“, it’s an it’s an excellent way to describe blindly following processes without understanding the theory behind them. The term originates from a story about aboriginal islanders during World War II. During the war, cargo planes regularly (and from their perspective,…
There’s a blogger named Iris Classon that writes a series of posts called “stupid questions”, where she essentially posts a discussion-fueling question once per day. Recently, I noticed one there called “Should I Use Regions in my Code?”, and the discussion that ensued seemed to be one of whether regions were helpful in organizing code…
The Ben Franklin Effect Have you ever started looking for something, let’s say your wallet, and been fairly certain that it wasn’t in your house? You started looking in all of the most likely places and progressed with increasing glumness to less and less likely landing spots. Perhaps you eventually wound up in the crawl…
An Extraordinary Claim I was talking to a friend the other day, and he relayed a conversation that he’d had with a co-worker. They were discussing writing unit tests and the co-worker claimed that he writes unit tests regularly, but discards them and never checks them into source control. I was incredulous at this, so…
Gut Reaction I was talking with someone about possible approaches to an API the other day. He asked me if I’d favor a method that took a parameter and had a return value or if I’d prefer a method that was void and took two parameters but with one as a ref parameter. My immediate,…
