And so you code…
…
And so you code…
You’re at the office, everyday
Typing thousands lines of code

You spend your days debugging scripts
And your boss gives you the creeps
Sixty five developers
Planted in dark cubicles

Your team is always very late
Your work is just impossible
The deadline is already missed
CEO is always pissed

You drown yourself in tones of code
What a lousy daily mode
You wish for something truly else
To clean away the mess

But your boss is so stubborn. You’re stuck.
And so you code…
…
And so you code…

After six years you pass out
You set to try uniPaaS out
Complex projects are now a breeze
You beat deadlines with such great ease

Your lousy boss is now released
CEO is fully pleased
You take his place, you’re now in charge
You get an office nice and large

You’ve been promoted, you’re the boss
The rest who code, it’s just their loss
And you are happy as you can be, Alors,
Now you’re the boss,
…
Now you’re the boss,
Competition is still slow
Because they code,
And so they code…
…
And so they code…
Compile and load
In debug mode
And so they code…

Their brain corrode
Because they code
And so they code…
…
And so they code…

- The sooner you begin coding the later you finish.

- Any project can be estimated accurately (once it’s completed).

- The most valuable and least used WORD in a project manager’s vocabulary is “NO”.

- The most valuable and least used PHRASE in a project manager’s vocabulary is “I don’t know”.

- It takes one woman nine months to have a baby. It cannot be done in one month by impregnating nine women.

- You can con a sucker into committing to an impossible deadline, but you cannot con him into meeting it.

- At the heart of every large project is a small project trying to get out.

- If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.

- The more desperate the situation the more optimistic the situate.

- If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck.

- Too few people on a project can’t solve the problems – too many create more problems than they solve.

- A problem shared is a buck passed.

- A change freeze is like the abominable snowman: it is a myth and would anyway melt when heat is applied.

- A user will tell you anything you ask about, but nothing more.

- A user is somebody who tells you what they want the day you give them what they asked for.

- Of several possible interpretations of a communication, the least convenient is the correct one.

- What you don’t know hurts you.

- The conditions attached to a promise are forgotten, only the promise is remembered.

- There’s never enough time to do it right first time but there’s always enough time to go back and do it again.

- I know that you believe that you understand what you think I said but I am not sure you realise that what you heard is not what I meant.

- Estimators do it in groups – bottom up and top down.

- Good estimators aren’t modest: if it’s huge they say so.

- The same work under the same conditions will be estimated differently by ten different estimators or by one estimator at ten different times.

- A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.

- What is not on paper has not been said.

- If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.

- If you fail to plan you are planning to fail.

- If you don’t attack the risks, the risks will attack you.

- A little risk management saves a lot of fan cleaning.

- The sooner you get behind schedule, the more time you have to make it up.

- A badly planned project will take three times longer than expected – a well planned project only twice as long as expected.

- If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs, you haven’t understood the plan.

- When all’s said and done a lot more is said than done.

- If at first you don’t succeed, remove all evidence you ever tried.

- Never put off until tomorrow what you can put off until the day after.

- Feather and down are padding – changes and contingencies will be real events.

- There are no good project managers – only lucky ones.

- The more you plan the luckier you get.

Onsite Coordinator
is one who thinks single woman can deliver nine babies in one month.

Client
is the one who doesn’t know why he wants a baby.

Marketing Manager
is a person who thinks he can deliver a baby even if no man and woman are available.

Resource Optimization Team
thinks they don’t need a man or woman; they’ll produce a child with zero resources.

Documentation Team
thinks they don’t care whether the child is delivered, they’ll just document 9 months.

Quality Auditor
is the person who is never happy with a delivered baby.

Tester
is a person who always tells that this is not the Right baby.

HR Manager
is a person who thinks that… a donkey can deliver a human baby – if given 9 Months !!!

Hope this helps you identify which team role is your natural preference… and don’t forget, there are no good project managers – only lucky ones.

Management lesson - never start a project unless all resources are available

A few days ago I had to solve some very ugly bug that was caused by exactly the same approach I mentioned.

The code contained some calculation with a very large numbers and some how the results weren’t close to what we expected.

Let’s see some code

            // Example #2
            var firstValue = 3;
            var secondValue = 0;
            var result = firstValue / secondValue;

Simple, isn’t it. Running the above code will throw DivideByZeroException exception as we all expected.

Now look at the following code. Will it behave the same way ?

            // Example #2
            var firstValue = 3.5;
            var secondValue = 0;
            var result = firstValue / secondValue;

As you probably suspected – it won’t. It will run and complete without throwing any exception at all.
So, what happened here ? Are we talking about some serious bug Microsoft isn’t aware of ?

Well, first of all it is not a bug. The difference between the two examples is the type we are trying to divide by zero. In the first example firstValue is an Integer and in the second example is Double.

Does that mean we can divide floating point numbers by zero ? Yes we can.

Now you are probably wondering what will be the the value of result. Well, the answer is – Infinity. Yes, there is a value called Infinity and to be more specific, in our case the result is a Positive Infinity. The interesting part is because Infinity is a value you can make calculations with it and it won’t throw any exception. Let’s see some examples :

            var i = 3.5 / 0;                // Infinity
            var t1 = i++;                   // Infinity
            var t2 =  i--;                  // Infinity
            var t3 = i/i;                   // NaN
            var t4 = i * i;                 // Infinity
            var t5 = i>0;                   // true
            var t6 = i > double.MaxValue;   // true
            var t7 = double.MaxValue - i;   // -Infinity [ Negative Infinity ]
            var t8 = i-i;                   // NaN

So, now we know that calculations using Infinity are possible but in most cases the result won’t be something you can use for further calculation. By the way, if you will try to insert Infinity into Microsoft SQL field (at least in 2005) it will throw an exception saying “The supplied value is not a valid instance of data type float”.

And now i would like to return to the bug i was talking about at the beginning of this post.
What do you think will be the result of the following code.

            var i = 3.5 / 0;
            var result = (long)i;

The result is very numeric, not NaN and not Infinite but -9223372036854775808.
Now imagine situation when you must calculate some numbers that represent money, I mean loans, balance, etc. I’m sure you can easily understand how far can it go and which unpleasant result we can get.

C# provide us some usefull functions and constants we can and must use to avoid the above mistakes.

            //  Returns a value indicating whether the specified number
            //  evaluates to negative or positive infinity
            double.IsInfinity(double d) 

            //  Returns a value indicating whether the specified number
            // evaluates to negative infinity.
            double.IsNegativeInfinity (double d)

            //  Returns a value indicating whether the specified number
            //  evaluates to positive infinity.
            double.IsPositiveInfinity (double d)

            //  Represents negative infinity. This field is constant.
            double.NegativeInfinity 

            //  Represents positive infinity. This field is constant.
            double.PositiveInfinity

            //  Represents a value that is not a number (NaN).
            //  This field is constant.
            double.NaN

Floating point is necessary in so many cases – use it wisely and carefully.

Funniest source code comments :

// Dear maintainer:
// Once you are done trying to 'optimize' this routine,
// and have realized what a terrible mistake that was,
// please increment the following counter as a warning
// to the next guy:
// total_hours_wasted_here = 13

// When I wrote this, only God and I understood what I was doing
// Now, God only knows

// I'm sorry.

// Always returns true.
public boolean isAvailable() {
    return false;
}

// You are not meant to understand this

// I am not sure if we need this, but too scared to delete.

// Dear future me. Please forgive me.
// I can't even begin to express how sorry I am.

double penetration; // ouch

// Mr. Compiler, please do not read this.

// Hard to explain

// Empty constructor to satisfy the stupid compiler

public GetRandomNumber()
{
    // Chosen by a fairly rolen dice
    // guaranteed to be random
    return 3;
}

// DON'T SCREW WITH THIS CODE UNLESS YOU REALLY UNDERSTAND IT!

Twitteleh requires that you answer three basic questions:
Where are you?
What have you eaten?
Are you wearing a sweater?

ASP.NET was an easy choise for a server side code, but what about client side ?
The heavy viewstate, endless event handlers and infinity number of server side requests just to make the GUI  friendly – well, it just didn’t sound as a proper way to do it.

So, what do we have ?
.NET as a server side platform, but despite  all it’s powerful abilities it has nothing to do with client side. At the end of the day all those fancy control are just HTML and JavaScript.

JavaScript is still the engine that runs at the client side and it’s great, but we all know how many lines of code we have to write and time to spend to make it fast, modular and cross browser.

jQuery – it’s a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development.

Indeed, we can do a many things with jQuery and it realy simplify the coding, but what if we have to build a product list with complicated HMTL, complex logic and real time manipulation ?

As i mentioned before, ASP.NET and UpdatePanels are just to heavy and JavaScript is to long.

So, i did some research and find a couple of JavaScript Template Engines.
The first one i bumped in was jsRepeater. At first it seemed like a great solution but after a few tests i found all kinds of bugs related to the syntax conflicts with HTML and JavaScript.

After a few days of googling, tests and googling again i found the one and only –  jTemplates.
jTemplates is a template engine for JavaScript, wich is wraped in a jQuery Plugin.
The syntax is very simple and  intuitive. It’s support parameters, includes, if/else, loops, JavaScript functions and many other nice and usable features.

Let’s say we want to list all our products. What we have to do is to write the template (HTML), pass the data and we have a product list.

Look how easy this is. You just write HTML and werever you need to insert some data you put {$.T.P.ColumnName}.

So, how we use it ?
Just add some textarea to your page, give it some id, set it’s display style to none and write your template inside.

<textarea cols="0" rows ="0" style="display:none;" id="ProductListTemplate"><!--
{#foreach $T.Product as P}
	<div style=”float:left;width:150px;height:150px”>
		<div>{$T.P.Title}</div>
		<img src=”{$T.P.Url}” alt=”{$T.P.Title}” style=”width:10px;height:10px” />
		<hr />
		<div>Price : {$T.P.Price}$</div>
	</div>
{#/for}
--></textarea>

Add some empty container that will hold the result.

<div id="ProductListContainer"></div>

Execute setTemplateElement and execute processTemplate while passing the data into it as a parameter

$("#ProductListContainer").setTemplateElement("ProductListTemplate");
$("#ProductListContainer").processTemplate(data);

Easy, isn’t it ?
I must say that the above example is a simple one, but I’ve been using jTemplates to create complicated lists, grids, trees, popups and even an image editing web application. Use it, I’m sure you will love it.

And the same one but with Russian subtitles: