Think back to the last time you looked at an unfamiliar block of code. Did you immediately understand what it was doing? If not, you’re not alone – many software developers, including myself, find it challenging to grasp unfamiliar code quickly…
Many years ago, I took part in the development of a taxi-hailing mobile app that is still widely used today. I don’t know what kind of code they’re running now, but in those early days, the driver assignment code –if I remember it correctly– was similar in spirit to the grossly simplified example that follows. There are five levels of nested if statements in less than 30 lines of code. It doesn’t look so bad, some might say, but it’s not difficult to imagine how complicated this code can become with just a few more checks…
When writing code, you can call any function as long as it’s public, and similarly, you can access any object’s public properties or methods. Usually, access to code is all or none – a piece of code can be either public or private. Lately, I’ve been thinking about ways to implement more fine-grained access controls and have looked to the networking world for inspiration…
In the beginning, there was only HTML. The first official HTML specification focused on semantic markup. There were minimal styling tags and attributes. It was up to the web browser how to render the markup in an HTML document. The whole specification was refreshingly simple. You could easily read it in one sitting…
In a relational database, foreign keys are normally used to associate records stored in different tables, but wouldn’t it be nice to define relationships dynamically without having to add extra columns or tables? And while we’re at it, how about having sparse relationships by associating a record directly with any other record like “post X was last edited by user #123” or “post X was flagged for review by user #456” (who happens to be a moderator)?
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
