Because you definitely all care about my opinions on phones :) The very short version is I really like this phone and recommend it for anyone who likes the Google Pixel but is put off by the price. Now for the details! The hardware is really nice, it feels solid and well put-together. Fair warning, it is a phablet and the formfactor is very large – without a case the.. Read More
Let’s talk about classes! Classes in Java are super weird (okay they’re weird in any language), and I really struggled with them when I was learning Java, so don’t feel bad if classes/objects are hard for you. When you write simple code where everything is in main and runs immediately, it’s way easier. With classes you can’t just write it and call it, you have to create an instance first. What’s.. Read More
Don’t be a time thief. More precisely, if a decision has been made let it stay made. This tip won’t necessarily change your personal output a whole lot, although you will have more time for your own work if you don’t waste it rehashing old decisions, but it will be fantastic for your team’s productivity. Being a better programmer isn’t just about how much you personally get done, it’s also.. Read More
A little bit of self-doubt is good for you! That might sound weird but hear me out. Doubting yourself just enough to accept the fact that you don’t know everything and will be wrong sometimes is incredibly useful in software development. So many projects have died when the thing that everyone assumed would be easy (or at least doable) turned out not to be. If you can accept that you could be.. Read More
Remember how great Authenticator Plus is? Recently a coworker told me about another great thing it can do – categories! If you have 2FA set up for many accounts like I do, it gets to be a pain scrolling through that list to find the one you want. Categories to the rescue! From the settings menu go to manage categories, from there you can create new categories and put authenticators.. Read More
Don’t reinvent the wheel! I’ve touched on this before, but it definitely merits its own post. A huge part of becoming a better developer is understanding when you don’t need to write new code to solve a problem. The more code you write, the more code you have to maintain, the more chances you have to screw it up, and the more time it takes to write it. So before.. Read More
Today’s code smell is long parameter lists. If you have lots and lots of parameters, something is likely going wrong. Odds are good your method is just doing too much, which leads to confusing code that’s hard to understand and change. Another reason lots of parameters causes problems is that when you call that method, it’s very easy to accidentally get two parameters of the same type in the wrong order.. Read More
Today’s code smell is feature envy. Feature envy is when one class uses the methods of another class to excess. It’s called feature envy because classes that use methods from another class excessively look envious of that class’s features. The problem with that, as usual, is the way your logic gets spread around between multiple classes. If you have one method that’s using another class so much that it’s hardly.. Read More
Jessica Kerr has a really interesting blog post about how code reuse is often overrated. Back in college I learned all about how important code reuse was and how duplicated code was the worst, but we never (probably because we had a lot of material to cover in a limited time) talked about how code reuse can cause problems. Jessica gives a great explanation of how bad code reuse can.. Read More
Today’s code smell is switch statements. Long switch statements or complicated if statements often (but not always!) mean that something has gone wrong with your design. Objected oriented languages give you a lot of tools to avoid big complicated switches, if you aren’t using one of those there needs to be a good reason for it. If you’re not using an object oriented language, on the other hand, I’m honestly.. Read More