2014-03-27

Protecting your resource identifiers

In a lot of older web applications as well as newer RESTful services I've seen it fairly common to have identifiers such as user and order IDs just being an auto incremented primary key from the database. This approach has the problem of revealing your total number of users/orders in a certain time period. Information your competitors could use against you!

2014-03-20

When to use Tuples in C#

I've seen people use the Tuple class in C# code and I've even done it myself once. And I didn't like it. I'm still struggling to see find a case where using a Tuple would actually be a good idea versus the alternatives.

2014-03-13

Tail Recursion and C#

Tail recursion is a powerful optimization since it typically improves both execution time and memory usage for recursive calls. It can also be your enemy if you forget about it.

2014-03-06

Logical task combinators

When I had to use Erlang for the very first time it was a brand new language and I was in collage. Back then Erlang did not have a logical not function so we had to define our own in order to make our code readable. At least given the knowledge me and my lab partner had at the time. So the other week I had a deja vu moment since I had a Task<bool> that I wanted to negate. At first it felt real weird and I ended up solving my problem in a different way. But then I started to think.