I would like to preface this post by saying that I don’t like the Singleton design pattern at all. There are some who love it, others who view it as a sometimes-useful, often-abused tool in the toolbox, and then there are people like me who believe that it’s extremely rare to see a use of…
I spent a lot of years diligently commenting my code. I wrote what the code did next to the statements themselves and I wrote method headers and sometimes I even kept a journal of edits in that header as if there were no such thing as source control. As I mentioned in an earlier post,…
What is a Scratchpad? When you have a question like “what exception is thrown when I try to convert a long that is too big to an integer” or “what is the difference in performance between iterating over a list or a dictionary converted to a list” what do you do? Google it? Phone a…
A Tragic Story It starts out innocently enough. You’re out at a party with some friends, and some people you want to impress are there. Everyone is having a good time, but you notice that some of the ‘cool’ kids are periodically going into a room and coming out giggling. Not wanting to be left…
In a previous post some time back, I had expressed some skepticism about TDD as a design practice. I talked about test-driven development and its relationship with prototyping and the “make one to throw away” concept. Since I’m not one ever to believe that I’ve arrived at the optimal solution, I’m doing another round of…
