If you’re going to reinvent the wheel, you should at least make sure your new version is somehow better than the previous kind. Reimplementing standard UI and OS widgets is one of the most common ways developers reinvent the wheel these days — it started with Flash developers building their own controls, and has now spread […]
Tag Archives: best practices
Testing Backward-Incompatible Changes
Monday, October 12th, 2009 – 11:06 am
Let’s say one day you decide to add a feature to your software or service. For example, you need a new flag on user accounts, so that different types of users get different features. (These don’t even have to be tiered account levels; maybe accounts of type “music lover” get a widget in the sidebar […]
Notes on LJ Content Sieve
Saturday, July 4th, 2009 – 2:07 pm
My latest project is something I call “LJ Content Sieve”: a Greasemonkey script to filter out content on one’s Livejournal views based on nearly any attribute of a post or comment. However, Livejournal is very customizable. It has 31 different “layouts”, each of which can then be further “themed” by application of CSS. This means […]
Would Shlemiel the Painter Optimize Prematurely?
Thursday, June 18th, 2009 – 2:34 pm
I don’t want to optimize this code prematurely. And “while you’re still writing it” is probably premature. On the other hand, totally ignoring algorithmic complexity is a sure route to a Shlemiel the Painter’s algorithm. Do I really want to just write the whole thing, and then start profiling it to see where the hot […]
TDD and Peace of Mind
Monday, May 4th, 2009 – 9:53 am
Let’s face it, we’re not perfect. As much as I might realize that automated testing is a good practice, it still feels like a chore sometimes. In my latest round of personal-project development, just setting up a decent set of test fixtures and a working test framework turned into something of a hassle, as it’s […]