Over the past two decades, I’ve worked as a software developer, tech lead, and CTO at various startups, including my own. I’ve accumulated a number of principles I use to make major technical decisions. Most of the principles outlined here were learned the hard way. You might not fully agree with all of the principles, but I hope at least some of them could help those who struggle with tough technical decisions…

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Software development would be a lot easier without so many bugs. In a typical software application, there’s a never-ending stream of bugs as far as the eye can see. Some of the bugs make users’ lives miserable, some of them are annoying but can be dealt with workarounds, and the rest are mostly minor inconveniences…

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When you work with software developers, especially those with less experience, it’s virtually guaranteed to hear one of them utter a version of the above expression when someone presents them with a situation they think is impossible (or more likely, improbable) to happen in the program they’ve written…

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In the software world, we don’t have as many complicated terms as there are in biology, but we aren’t completely immune to giving complex-sounding names to what should be simple concepts – some of us even enjoy getting pedantic about them. Here are some of my favorites, with examples in JavaScript…

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I will never forget the time I discovered how web pages were made. The year was 1995. I was using Windows 3.1 like most everyone, and it didn’t even support the TCP/IP network stack out of the box. I had to install a program called Trumpet Winsock and a hot new web browser called Netscape to connect to the Internet…

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I was looking to buy speaker stands for my KEF LS50 Metas and the DIY KEF LS50 Clone I use as my center channel speaker. KEF’s matching extruded aluminum S2 stands were a natural choice. Unfortunately, they were quite expensive, and I’m not really a fan of single column stands anyway, so I decided to build a few dual column stands myself…

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Is it possible to make code easier to read than to write? After all, code is read more often than it is written when multiple developers work on the same codebase. If developers spend less time to understand how the existing code works, they can start writing code faster…

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What happens when a function call fails? Can you retry without causing any unintended side effects? If the answer is no, then your function is probably not robust enough…

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Over the years I’ve seen all sorts of SQL mistakes made by developers on my teams, and I’ve made quite a few of them myself. I’d like to share what I’ve learned with you, starting with security first…

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One of the most effective methods for detecting invalid types is to validate function arguments in runtime. Instead of using an all-purpose validation library designed for validating a wide range of data types, it might make more sense to use a library tailor-made to validate function arguments. With that idea in mind, I’ve created a lightweight JavaScript function argument validation library called fn-arg-validator…

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Since you can buy two to three pairs of KEF Q150 for the price of one pair of LS50 Meta depending on whether there’s a sale or not, I decided to build an LS50 clone using a Q150 driver to see if they would sound similar after equalization. The clone wouldn’t have the beautiful curved front baffle and better crossover of LS50 Meta, but it would otherwise be very similar in construction….

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When Design Patterns first got published, the year was 1994, a rather primitive time when functional programming languages that support first class functions were rarely used outside academia. These days, though, we have mainstream languages such as JavaScript and Python that can be used to trivially implement many of the design patterns described in the book with only a few lines of code…

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