I was incredulous when I read this observation from Reginald Braithwaite: Like me, the author is having trouble with the fact that 199 out of 200 applicants for every programming job can’t write code at all. I repeat: they can’t write any code whatsoever. The author he’s| Coding Horror
In a way, these two books are responsible for my entire professional career. With early computers, you didn’t boot up to a fancy schmancy desktop, or a screen full of apps you could easily poke and prod with your finger. No, those computers booted up to the command| Coding Horror
I didn’t choose to be a programmer. Somehow, it seemed, the computers chose me. For a long time, that was fine, that was enough; that was all I needed. But along the way I never felt that being a programmer was this unambiguously great-for-everyone career field with zero downsides.| Coding Horror
The dot-com bubble was a watershed event for software developers. You simply couldn’t work in the field without having something miraculous or catastrophic happen to you. Or both at once. The “dot-com bubble” was a speculative bubble covering roughly 1995 — 2001 during which stock markets in Western nations saw| Coding Horror
In my previous post on shuffling, I glossed over something very important. The very first thing that came to mind for a shuffle algorithm is this: for (int i = 0; i < cards.Length; i++) { int n = rand.Next(cards.Length); Swap(ref cards[i], ref cards[n]); } It’s a| Coding Horror
In an earlier post on the philosophy of code comments, I noted that the best kind of comments are the ones you don’t need. Allow me to clarify that point. You should first strive to make your code as simple as possible to understand without relying on comments as| Coding Horror
Every programmer ever born thinks whatever idea just popped out of their head into their editor is the most generalized, most flexible, most one-size-fits all solution that has ever been conceived. We think we've built software that is a general purpose solution to some set of problems, but we are| Coding Horror