Category: Programming
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...
Read MoreOracle, index-organized tables, and overflow tablespaces
SQL Error: ORA-25191: cannot reference overflow table of an index-organized table
A refresher: a SQL database is relational, and rows are stored unsorted; Oracle calls standard tables heap-organized tables. For a given SQL query, unless an ORDER BY clause is used, results can be returned in any order. Oracle also has IOTs, which are tables that are instead stored in a B*Tree index structure. This structure stores all columns of the table, sorted by primary key; because this is both the table and the index, accessing rows is much faster and less storage space is needed than for a heap-organized table with a separate index.
Read MoreComma placement in sql scripts
It’s a truism that old habits are hard to break. Turn down the same street every day, and you’d better pay attention if you want to actually make it past that intersection without turning! One habit I feel that I...
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Building a Pugly-Linked List
Meet Janie. Janie has an ever-changing menagerie of pugs, and would like to use a data structure...
Read MoreInterfaces in C#
Consider test-driving a new car, of a make and model you’re not familiar with. It’s unlikely you’ll need any instruction in how to do it: rightmost pedal makes the car go, pedal next to it makes the car stop....
Read MoreWhen not to optimize
Software development has some consistent goals. We want the software to be as fast as possible, as small as possible, to work as well as possible, and to be done as soon as possible. Naturally there tend to be trade-offs between...
Read MoreDelegation, flexibility, and software development
Something that occurred to me yesterday is how much less structured my work week is than it used to be. When I was a new developer, my TL (team lead) liked to have everyone maintain a spreadsheet showing everything that we were...
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Checklists and Software Development
In 2011, Atul Gawande published The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. I first became...
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Error! Error!
One of my least favorite errors is ORA-01775: looping chain of synonyms. This often means that...
Read MorePreparing for Microsoft exams: how and why
The value of certification is a constant hot topic for many people; a search for certifications on stack overflow alone returns over 27,000 results, and adding the exact phrase “worth it” still returns almost 800. I’ve never...
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