Tag Archives: programming

Clean code is not a goal

Photo by Kevin Ku on Unsplash Dan Abramov on how he once overnight refactored a piece of WET code written by a colleague, but then got called out for doing so: My boss invited me for a one-on-one chat where they politely asked me to revert my change. I was aghast. The old code was …

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Tests and types

Brent has some thoughts on strong and weakly typed programming languages. Starting point: a simple function that needs testing: rgbToHex(red, green, blue) { // … } Testing the result the function should return is easy. But what about edge cases? What happens though if we pass doubles instead of integers? Or numbers outside of the …

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Layers of Technical Debt and Complexity

On July 8, 2015 the New York Stock Exchange went down due to a software glitch. Over at Medium, Zeynep Tufekci went into detail on how it comes that software sucks. Software sucks for many reasons, all of which go deep, are entangled, and expensive to fix. […] LAYERS AND LEGACIES: A lot of software …

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Falsehoods programmers believe about time and time zones

Every day has 24 hours Every day without DST changes is 86400 (60 * 60 * 24) seconds long Every day in UTC is 86400 (60 * 60 * 24) seconds long Week one of a year starts in January every year If I know what time zone someone is in and they just tell …

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