Source Modalities: Rules and Conditions
While analyzing and editing source code, much of the work to be done is rather straightforward. Many business applications are data stores with a user interface so a non-developer can manage the data. Even these applications, however, intro ...
2021.04.03
The Theme of Your Code
In the past 25 years, or so, it has become popular to consider high-level structure of programs in chunks defined by a group affectionately referred to as the “Gang of Four”. They wrote a book called “Design Patterns”1 which laid out common ...
2021.03.27
Naming Things Part 3: Using Methods for Context
This is part three of a multi-part series on naming things. Part two will be useful1. When looking for the right name for something you can end up with a pretty long name. In part 2, we looked at capturing conditional context by extractin ...
2021.03.25
Analyzing Source Code: Source Textemes
I realized a few years ago that one of the most important aspects of writing software, to me, is to build it for people. For several years, I thought, given enough research, there was a technical solution out there that would help me to fin ...
2021.03.23
What If Interfaces... But Not?
Imagine this scenario: Two people are sitting at a conference, side by side. One of them says, “interfaces aren’t everything”.The other person says, “I would never work in a language without interfaces”. This actually happened. The first pe ...
2021.03.18
Naming Things Part the Second, or Simple Expressions
This is part two of a herminyherm-part series on naming things. Part one might be useful for you1. Though naming primitives1 is a nice way to start spotting repeated values in your code, I believe naming really starts coming into its own ...
2021.03.15
The Language of Software
I read an article the other day (which I will not cite, due to unsupported claims) that stated reading source code is not like reading language. They cite this article on an MIT study which states that reading code is not like reading langu ...
2021.03.03
Naming Things Part the First, or Magic Primitives
Something I learned about years ago, and I continually preach is names. I could (and likely will) write at length about the hows and whys. I will, however, begin with a short story. Story TimeI worked with a couple of other developers who, ...
2021.02.22
What the Code Tells You
The world around us contains a number of contextual clues we have become so comfortable with, it’s common to forget they are there at all. These contextual clues are often referred to as affordances. An affordance is a contextual clue about ...
2020.10.14
Optimizing for the Developer: Mindful Intentionality
I was listening to a podcast a while ago and a discussion came up regarding why leaves are green. I found it fascinating. I’m neither a chemist nor a physicist, so I didn’t realize that green light is the most energetic light. I did, howe ...
2020.10.08
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