Code revisiting and housekeeping

 11th April 2009 by Chris

Its a great success for every programmer once a project or an assignment has been completed. But give it a day, a week or even a month and the good old code in place is now stale.

Its every programmer's duty to revisit their codes once in awhile and reassess if the old codes are still pretty much the best codes to be inplace or if there's something new that could do something better, faster and easier with much less effort than before.

Caution: Programming is addictive

 30th January 2009 by Chris

True that its symptoms of pain gradually increases over time. I'm a touch typist and I usually feel the pain when typing things for long straight hours without a break. (just like when I blog or when I program). The pain now lasts longer and disappears only for a short while. It has gotten into my attention lately, and so I tried to work on a short term remedy. I bought myself a wrist brace. Although Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) states that CTS is not directly proven to be caused by repetitive activities as compared to structural and biological risk factors, I still cannot take away the fact that the pain emanates during contact with the computer. *Below are photos of my wrist brace*.

Trust nothing but tests

 21st November 2008 by Chris

Where have all the tests gone?  What tests??? I "shoulda", I coulda.. but can't.  My energy gets wasted.  

Sound familiar?  I know it does.

The type I wanna be

 3rd July 2008 by Chris

I have been misled by my understanding of a "Hacker". I've always thought and believed that "hacking" is a selfish act.. an act of abusing intellectual ability.

My misconception

When I was young, back then, CDs were burned at the highest speed of 32x.. my CDROM can only read those burned up to 16x. It was a terrifying fact that I cannot buy the high end CDs because of financial limitations. I had to stick by the 'old' CDs that were sold at a cheaper cost because they had to get rid of the 'slow' CDs. I end up scavenging those CDs that nobody would even like. I take whatever interests me. Sometimes its frustrating to find the ebook CD you want burned at a higher speed I cannot read. At worst, the seller doesn't even know the speed used for burning and sell out a copy that I cannot even use. But there is one though that I wanted and was burned at a lower speed.. it was a "Hacking Tools" CD.

This was one of my favorite CDs. I learned that the CD I bought won't teach me anything about 'good' pride. By good, I mean the pride that you get from giving your projects a good thought, ample time of planning and rigorous code development. It taught me about 'bad' pride. It showed me a lot of 'instant gratification' coding. I'd like to call these tricks and 'hacks'.

With this, it kinda stuck in my head that 'hacking' is a negative term. I have confused the "Masters" with the "Crashers".

Versioning your releases

 24th June 2008 by Chris

Unless you’ve never used any software, nor have been exposed to the computer then you would have never seen version numbers for applications both offline and online.

Software versioning is the process of assigning either unique version names or unique version numbers to unique states of computer software. Within a given version number category (major, minor), these numbers are generally assigned in increasing order and correspond to new developments in the software. At a fine-grained level, revision control is often used for keeping track of incrementally different versions of electronic information, whether or not this information is actually computer software.

Writing good code

 13th June 2008 by Chris

It has long been a debate on how to describe 'good code'. What are the criteria for declaring a code to be good, neat, and dry?

My advocacy is to promote writing good quality code. It is by painstaking practice and tons of reading that I get to exercise this advocacy. It is but a long journey, but little steps lead you to understanding and qualifying a code to be of high quality. So what are my benchmarks?

• Long codes are less readable and more likely to fail.

Ruby scripts are far smaller and more compact in size compared to Java codes or C++ codes. Trust me, I've seen some and comparing them to Ruby, reading Java codes or C++ codes that are not mine would take me a longer time for understanding (even if docs and other help materials are present). Ruby has good metaprogamming (that sometimes gets abused because of monkey patching) and produce straightforward codes. Each line would end up more like real English sentences.

If you write ruby codes that take up to more than twenty lines.. hmm.. well, its doomed to fail, for sure. Refactor and review!

• Codes that don't look anything like its API source is really smelly.

APIs are there for you to use as a general sitemap. It is your guide to efficiently write code with ease. Usually, APIs are well documented and even provide examples or snippets of codes to demonstrate its use. The lines of codes involved may also be present for you to inspect its process and even predict if it will pass your expectations.