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SEARCH KEYWORD -- Problem solving

  Writing unit tests for legacy code – an open letter to developers I work with

This is an email I sent today to developers who work with me, it is exactly as I wrote it except for project and developer names which I’ve redacted. Dear Developers, S asked me a difficult question today, and I think the answer (which took me a few minutes to arrive at) is worth sharing with all developers, mainly because many of you will surely face the exact same problem especially in [maintenance and enhancement] projects. By now I think it is crystal clear that one of our non-ne...

   Unit testing,Open letter     2012-02-09 05:39:56

  Why you should be careful about optimizations

In one of my current javascript projects, I have to deal with 3D voxel coordinates. And, sometimes, I have floating points coordinates which must be converted to integers in order to convert them into proper array index. Javascript is a wonderful language, really. However, implementations are sometimes weird, and the way to do something can sometimes have very huge impacts on the performances. Worse, sometimes the classical way is more expensive than the tricky one. So, some peo...

   JavaScript,Bitwise,Floor,Trick,Optimization     2012-05-02 11:29:20

  RAM is the new disk...

Jim Gray, a man who has contributed greatly to technology over the past 40 years, is credited with saying that memory is the new disk and disk is the new tape. With the proliferation of "real-time" web applications and systems that require massive scalability, how are hardware and software relating to this meme? Tim Bray, in his discussions about grid computing before it became such a hot topic, pointed out how advances in hardware around RAM and networking were allowing for the creation...

   RAM,Flash,Memory,,Future,Disk     2011-08-12 07:34:27

  Test-Driven Development? Give me a break...

Update: At the bottom of this post, I've linked to two large and quite different discussions of this post, both of which are worth reading... Update 2: If the contents of this post make you angry, okay. It was written somewhat brashly. But, if the title alone makes you angry, and you decide this is an article about "Why Testing Code Sucks" without having read it, you've missed the point. Or I explained it badly :-)Some things programmers say can be massive red flags. When I h...

   Test driven,Application design,tool     2011-10-17 10:19:16

  Spurring the Consumer Feedback Loop with Connected Devices

In a press release from earlier this year, Gartner had predicted that by the year 2018 mobile devices would account for initiating 5% of consumer services cases, registering a marginal rise of 0.02% from 2014. Research shows that most businesses lose around a whopping $83 billion owing to poor consumer services (Source: kissmetrics) in the US alone while globally, the average cost of losing a consumer is $243. It is only viable to think of automating support services as a way to lower the costs ...

   Big Data Analytics Solutions, Loyalty Programs for Customers     2015-08-18 07:11:35

  Carriage return and line feed

In programming and document editing, we may frequently encounter carriage return and line feed, i.e the well known CRLF.  But do you know about the history and difference of carriage return and line feed? Before computer came out, there was a type of teleprinter called Teletype Model 33. It can print 10 characters each second. But there is one problem with this, after finishing printing each line, it will take 0.2 second to move to next line, which is time of printing 2 characters. If a new...

   CR,CARRIAGE RETURN,LINE FEED,LF,NEW LINE,CRLF     2017-02-19 08:29:23

  Scala, Patterns and The Perl Effect

He tried to understand that one concept for a couple of months before it made sense to him. Admittedly, partial functions are not intuitive for anyone who has been schooled in traditional programming, but still, looking at the problem he was trying to solve it seemed like James was required to expend too much effort relative to the simplicity of the problem (as he pointed out, now that he understands the concept it seems straightforward). He showed me the code, and it was basically a situa...

   Scala,Perl,Pattern,Partial function,Template     2011-12-21 09:25:41

  Some hidden XSS injection vulnerabilities

XSS injection refers to a Web page generates some unexpected executable js codes based on user input  and these executable codes are executed by web browser,i.e, the source code sent to web browser by the server contains some illegal js codes, and these illegal js codes are related to user's input. Common XSS injection vulnerabilities can be fixed with some functions such as htmlspecialchars(escaping HTML special characters) and strip_tags() or similar, but there are some hidden XSS injecti...

   XSS,PHP,Security,Code,JavaScript     2012-08-27 20:32:08

  10 New Year’s resolutions for designers

Get the new year off to a positive start with these design resolutions Wake up. I hope you enjoyed your holiday because it’s a new year and it’s time to get back to work. We did pretty good last year. We started standing up for ourselves. We stopped working for free. We started getting our financial house in order. (Please don’t make me do the contract thing again this year.) We rediscovered typography ...

   Designer,Chanllenge,2012,New UI     2012-01-18 09:11:02

  Application vs Database Programming

A few years ago, I had a problem.  A database routine for processing bulk payments for LedgerSMB that was humming along in my test cases was failing when tested under load with real data prior to implementation.  Some testing showed that while it ran fine with small numbers of inputs, it eventually slowed way down as the number of inputs rose.  Andrew Sullivan, who was also on the project through a different company, suggested it was something called a "cache miss" because I...

   Application Programming,Database programming,Comparison,Difference     2012-03-04 12:08:35

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