Archive for January, 2012
Everything can be a server/client!
We Tech Artists can get intimidated when talking about servers and clients. They remind us of a world of frameworks and protocols we’re not familiar with, run by hardcore server programmers who seem to have a very demanding job. Fortunately, that needn’t be the case, and understanding how to...
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“Make it work”
I know a managers that use ‘make it work’ as an implicit demand, knowing they’re asking you to do the impossible with inadequate resources and forcing you to deal with it- as if it isn’t they’re responsibility. I know developers that are all too eager to say they’ll ‘make...
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A few blog site guidelines
Adding feeds to Planet Tech Art, it became clear that not everyone studies great bloggers like Scott Hanselman or Dave Winer. Here are some rules: Your full name should appear somewhere on your main page. Prominently if you are advertising yourself, but at least somewhere in the footer or...
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Large initializers/ctors?
With closures (and to some extent with runtime attribute assignments), I find the signatures of my UI types shrink and shrink. A lot of times we have code like this (python, but the same would apply to C#): class FooControl(Control): def __init__(self, value): super(FooControl).__init__() self.value = value self._InitButtons() def...
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Three options for data correctness
In a previous post, I linked to Rico Mariani’s performance advice for Data Access Layers. On G+, Tyler Good asked: I just read the posts and the linked blogs, I had a question about some specific implementations. How do you deal with classes that represent another non-[in this case]-Python...
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Why I will never develop for a big company again
I had this post written up for a long time, and it was much more ranty. But now I’ll just give you some facts (all of which are public) and let you fill in the blanks: Your bonus is based on “Target Bonus %” x (“Your Performance” + “Company...
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There’s idiomatic, and there’s just being respectful
I work in mixed language environments. Python, C#, C++, and more, can all make their rounds. It isn’t uncommon to have someone focused on C++ have to write something in another language, and it isn’t uncommon that I come across their code some point in the future. It is...
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Thank you, Rico Mariani, for reminding me how bad I was
A little while ago I read two great articles by Rico Mariani, a MS employee who usually blogs about performance in .NET (though python being an OO language the same advice applies there). The articles in question were these: Performance Guidelines for Properties Performance and Design Guidelines for Data...
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Be a deployment Boy Scout
The Boy Scouts have a rule: Leave your campsite cleaner than you found it. We know how to apply this rule when writing code but we often overlook this rule when it comes to installing or deploying that software. I’ve seen, and committed, some pretty heinous accounts of changing...
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Refraktor
Refraktor: (verb) When you refactor some code and in the process change or mess it up so completely that you need to revert all your changes.
