Thinking for Programmers

I was watching this great recording from last year on how programmers should think. It talks a lot about the importance of writing a specification for your code.

What to do with a caught exception

Some people like exceptions and some don't. Some people like them for exceptional things. Regardless of what type you are there is also a debate about what you do with that exception once you catch it.

These are not the abstractions you are looking for

People around me often hear me mumble things like "I think we are missing a level of abstraction here". This is something that often happens when I help people understand how to efficiently unit test a piece of code. But right before Christmas I was working in some code that perfectly highlighted that all abstractions are not equal.

The I have no idea what I'm testing anti-pattern.

It is no secret that I'm not a big fan of service locators in general, but even if you are a fan of those there is a pattern I really don't want to see in unit tests. I will call this the I-have-no-idea-what-I-am-testing-anti-pattern.

2014 statistics

So what did you enjoy in 2014. Here are the truth based on statistics.