About 5 years ago, I wrote a post titled “10% Development, 90% Maintenance“. That was my view on software development and still is today. Was frustrated by some code review recently and was thinking of how to communicate my penchant for maintainable code simply to both developers and non-developers. Came up with 3Cs for coding …
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Been developing a HTML5 video player solo from scratch at work for the past few months. The experience is summed up in the title of this post 😛 This post is not about discrediting the complexity of backend development or shooting back at backend developers who scoff at front-end developers. To be clear, I have …
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Was sitting on an interview panel recently and the interviewee was asked to rate himself for the Laravel PHP framework, on a scale of 1 to 10. Some basic questions on Laravel were asked before this but the answers were not satisfactory. His reply? 9/10. Personally, for PHP, I would probably rate myself 5/10, and …
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Let’s say you own a website with 2 webpages and you wish to install a third-party plugin to create a newsfeed on each page. In this case, I am the author of the newsfeed plugin that you have chosen. Below is a sample of how the plugin is embedded: <div class=”container”> <!– container element provided …
Continue reading “Responsible CSS – your plugin is only a tenant renting a room in someone’s house”
Given a variable myObj in Javascript, evaluating myObj.child.name || ‘Kid’ will cause an error if myObj.child does not exist. In comparison, in PHP, $myObj->child->name ?? ‘Kid’ would just yield “Kid” with no errors. One way would be to write the expression let result = (myObj && myObj.child && myObj.child.name) ? myObj.child.name : ‘Kid’;. Another way …
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This is similar to the previous blog post except this is more direct. The answer is “Yes” for all tested languages except C and C++. This may seem trivial until you meet a situation where the same original object is shared across requests/sessions, like a public static variable in Java or an incorrectly scoped Javascript …
As per title, ran this across various languages. Results are mixed, but IMHO, it seems unsafe to design your functions/methods this way. It would be better to pass in the object, compute the changes without modifying the object, return the computed changes and assign it back to the original variable. Below are sample code snippets …
Continue reading “Does modifying objects passed in to functions modify original object?”
Been using a lot of print() when working on iOS projects. Hoping to see more information printed to aid in debugging, I did up a simple logging class in Swift which infers the file, function and line number where the logging is done. Not using the stack trace as the output from Thread.callStackSymbols is not …
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References: How to get package name from anywhere? Get Android application package without Context Source code for android.app.ActivityThread This addresses the scenario where you are writing an Android library/SDK and it’s used in an app. How to get the actual app ID (package name) and version from inside the SDK? BuildConfig.APPLICATION_ID and BuildConfig.VERSION_NAME would return …
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Been using a lot of Log.d(TAG, “message”); when working on Android projects. Problem with TAG is that it needs to be explicitly declared, e.g. protected String TAG = MyClass.class.getSimpleName(); instead of being inferred. Unlike PHP, Java has no magic constants such as __CLASS__ or __FUNCTION__ that can resolve automagically to the class/method being used at …
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