Category: Programming
Setting Priorities
Assuming you get to set your own schedule, how do you choose what to work on next? Do you pick the most important task? The one with the closest deadline? The one most likely to make your boss (or significant other) happy? After...
Read MoreCommunication in Software Development
At a meetup I was at recently, the speaker asked what we thought were the most important soft skills. My answer was English, or more generally, communication. Programming can be thought of as communicating with the computer...
Read MoreMissing indexes in Oracle
Some little details cause trouble entirely disproportionate to their importance. One such thing is a little quirk in how Oracle handles indexes. I have some code which gets a list of tables using a particular criteria and then...
Read MoreParsing doubles in Finland
One problem I had this week is that a piece of code which had, for the previous few years, been perfectly behaved suddenly started crashing for a new customer. This was the first time I’d seen the code run on a Finnish...
Read MoreImproving query performance in SQL Server with recompile
This week I ran across a new-to-me option in some T-SQL code I was reviewing: OPTION (RECOMPILE). It turns out that this option improves performance by forcing SQL Server to recompile the query rather than using the plan it...
Read MoreAccessibility and HTML5: Semantic Elements and More
A div for everything and everything is in its div… If you’ve been working on websites for a while, you’ve no doubt had a few that seem to be just div after div, where the div explosion serves to place or style...
Read MoreTesting for accessibility: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
What makes a website accessible? The answer, of course, is that a website is accessible if it is usable by all people, regardless of disability. When building a website, however, we need something a little more concrete; we need...
Read MoreMaking your site screen reader accessible
One of the things I’ve been working on lately is ensuring that our web apps are accessible, which primarily means that those with visual impairments can use them. Partially that means making sure to use high-contrast...
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The Value of Design
When I first started as a developer, the process was simple. You picked (or were assigned) a bug...
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Quantifying Value
What is the value in what you do? As programmers, we tend to do what we do for two main reasons:...
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Ensuring Goodness
I heard a phrase I liked recently: software testing is ensuring goodness. [Alexander Tarlinder on...
Read MoreComputer science and programming interviews
Recently my friend Janie has done a series of blog posts on her disagreement with using computer science questions as a major part of the hiring process. I can agree with her, to a point. If you’re hiring for someone to do...
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