Month: February 2016

In 2011, Atul Gawande published The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. I first became aware of it when I had the opportunity to hear him speak during his book tour for his latest book, Being Mortal, at the end of 2014, but only got around to reading it this week. The book is about managing complexity in the medical field, but can also be applied to software development. The central thesis of the book is that modern knowledge has made the world too complex for humans to handle unaided. Take any complex profession – medicine, architecture, etc...

One of my least favorite errors is ORA-01775: looping chain of synonyms. This often means that you’ve referred to something that can’t be found for one reason or another – a table doesn’t exist, a table is owned by a different user, there actually is a synonym loop… The nice thing about Oracle error messages is they all come with descriptions to tell you what’s going on and numbers so you can look up more information. The bad thing is that the messages aren’t necessarily all that helpful, and the error may be too general to let you know...

The interesting thing about the conditional operator (?:) is that hardly anybody knows what it’s called (it’s often just referred to as the ternary operator), but everyone seems to have an opinion on whether it should be used. The conditional operator is shorthand for an if/else statement; rather than writing if (condition) {expression 1} else {expression 2} we can just write condition ? expression 1 : expression 2 I’ve had one code reviewer who was extremely against ever using this, to the point where I replaced the one I was using with an if/else statement (at the expense of...