Little Tutorials

Thought Driven Development a Methodology of Abile Development

Daniel Pietraru — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 20:11:28 +0000

Warning: This is a rant against TDD extremism! Sensitive TDD people better step out of this dark sleazy communist place right now! I used to believe in Agile Programming. I tried XP and Scrum. But at some moment the Agile movement moved onto milking the cow. Expensive books - lots of them - appeared on amazon.com [...]

Bad advice on exceptions from Joel

Daniel Pietraru — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 09:01:11 +0000

Starting from some comments on my exception handling series of articles I run into a couple of blogs pointing to this post on joelonsoftware.com. I think this is the worst advice on exception handling I have ever read, sorry Joel. I know this is an old post, I know Joel is entitled to his own opinion and [...]

Software development dogmata - good practices gone bad

Daniel Pietraru — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 18:56:01 +0000

Many practices in the software development world are widely accepted at some moment in time as the “true way”. The trouble starts when the “true way” is forced down the throats of people who need a “new way”. Usually popular practices follow a similar path between the moment somebody discovers/creates them and until they get [...]

How bad comments are born in your code

Daniel Pietraru — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 20:12:59 +0000

Many programmers mention their support for “good” comments in the code. A significant percentage of all developers think the quality of the comments is one of the traits that separate good experienced programmers from the rest. But the cruel reality is lots of code out there is not commented at all or, even worse, it [...]

Code review - The meaningless ritual

Daniel Pietraru — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 23:34:58 +0000

Most of the time code reviews are a meaningless ritual. Everybody pays lip service to the importance of code reviews and a lot of people, especially in the management, are convinced that code reviews very effectively reduce the number of shipped bugs. The problem is… most developers hate code reviews and avoid them like the plague. [...]

StringBuffer vs. StringBuilder performance comparison

Daniel Pietraru — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:18:17 +0000

Even if the StringBuilder was around for a while now, many people still use StringBuffer in single threaded applications. The main difference is stated in the StringBuffer comments: “As of release JDK 5, this class has been supplemented with an equivalent class designed for use by a single thread, {StringBuilder}. The StringBuilder class should generally [...]

The 10 minutes “Getting started with RMI” tutorial

Daniel Pietraru — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 20:35:49 +0000

Since Java 5 working with RMI (Remote Method Invocation) is very easy. You don’t need the rmic compiler unless you work with legacy RMI clients. Now stubs are generated automatically at runtime. As a result, writing distributed or client-server applications becomes trivial. Let’s see a very minimalistic example. Our scenario will have a server sharing an object [...]

36 steps to success as technical lead

Daniel Pietraru — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 16:14:48 +0000

The “tech lead” role can be treacherous at times. While the name implies “leadership“, most of the times it doesn’t come with implied authority like a manager role for example. It often happens that this role is in a no-man’s-land where it brings a lot of responsibility but not enough formal authority. In order to [...]

The Agile 800 Pounds Gorilla

Daniel Pietraru — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 11:43:20 +0000

I woke up this morning and I was Agile. We are all Agile now. Or we are gonna become Agile. Soon. No doubt about it. It is an order. And orders are not to be discussed, just executed. The Enterprise goes Agile! With the elegance of the huge battleship being pulled across a desert between oceans [...]

No, inheritance is not the way to achieve code reuse!

Daniel Pietraru — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:34:32 +0000

Every once in a while I interview a new computer science graduate for a developer position. I prefer to ask the kind of questions that will let me see how they think about programming, if they think for themselves and if they are passionate about it. Usually when I get to object oriented programming and I [...]