Archive for the ‘Programming’ Category
Thursday, October 8th, 2009
Back in august, I introduced the error tracking challenge. While it didn't get as much participation as I had hoped for, I did manage to collect some results.
In this post, I'll go through the most common ones, and suggest some approaches to avoiding them. Suggest your own errors and tips ...
Posted in Programming | 8 Comments »
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
Just as a reminder: If you participated in the error tracking challenge and haven't yet mailed your results to me, please do so ASAP. The address is jani at codeutopia net
I will be posting some results next week.
Posted in Programming | 1 Comment »
Saturday, September 12th, 2009
If you've written code, you've probably used the value null to indicate some variable is not set. This is perfectly good, but did you know there's more to nulls than just the value null?
There is also a null object, which doesn't really have anything to do with the value null, ...
Posted in Programming | 15 Comments »
Tuesday, September 1st, 2009
Peer reviewing is the practice of looking at code written by others to find errors or ways to improve the code. Sometimes also called desktop reviewing, this approach can be useful for various reasons:
If you have a coworker who is more experienced than you, you can learn from him/her
It's often ...
Posted in Programming | 1 Comment »
Friday, August 28th, 2009
You probably know what abstraction means - making a complex process simpler - but do you know what makes an abstraction good, and why it's important?
If you are writing code for a project that lives a bit longer, or has multiple developers working on it, having a good abstraction matters. ...
Posted in Programming | 3 Comments »
Monday, August 24th, 2009
The book Code Complete suggests to keep track of common mistakes. This is so that you can see what mistakes you make most often, and so that you can have a checklist of things that you should check when debugging.
I want to challenge you, dear reader, to keep track of ...
Posted in Programming | 7 Comments »
Friday, August 21st, 2009
Have you ever thought about writing a game? If you have, you've probably wondered how to render animations for your game characters. In this post, I'll show you how you can use JavaScript to do time-based sprite animations, drawing them on canvas - vital if you want to do a ...
Posted in Programming | 5 Comments »
Monday, August 17th, 2009
Here's some essential unit-testing posts I've written recently. While some of them have examples in PHP, they should still be useful in other languages as well.
Unit testing PHP series
Unit testing introduction
Writing and running tests
Writing tests for exsisting code
Mock Objects and testing code which uses the database
Test-driven development
General testing topics
Unit-testing JavaScript
How ...
Posted in Programming | 3 Comments »
Friday, August 14th, 2009
Image by Jim Frazier
I've recently been working on a code-base which wasn't designed with test-driven development methodologies, or with unit testing in mind. As I implemented unit-tests to this code, there were some modifications I had to do on the code.
Some modifications popped up more than others. There were a ...
Posted in Programming | 16 Comments »
Tuesday, August 4th, 2009
I've recently been looking into some JavaScript unit testing frameworks. There are many alternatives, and while many of them seem good, very few of them actually matched my requirements:
Must be able to run tests from the commend-line
Tests should be relatively easy to write
Posted in Programming | 4 Comments »
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