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…
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…
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…
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…
You’ve probably seen programmers calmly writing code at 200 keystrokes per minute to solve hideously complex problems under strict deadlines, and the programs they wrote run perfectly on the first try, often only a few seconds before something blows up real good…