Lying with statistics and StackOverflow

A recent article on StackOverflow performance brought some memories back; how easy it is to lie with statistics.

How object calisthenics can save the night

Last week we had a 24 hour hackathon at work. And I ended up using an old trick I've mentioned before.

Azure Load Balancer Nuggets

Up until recently I assumed the azure load balancer just was a simple round robin balancer.

Writing async tests

Ever since async/await was introduced in .net 4.5 I've seen people happily using those keywords in their (unit) tests. A usage I believe to be a mistake.

Avoiding conditionals to improve code

Last year Michael Feathers wrote an article about unconditional programming which in essence is just an idea to avoid any type of control structures since control structures tend to make code harder to understand. This is not a new idea.

Enforcing parameter names

In the late 90s I was asked to teach an "introduction to C for programmers" course at a large Swedish company. Turned out that my definition of programmer was quite different than that of the company.

Configuration files or APIs

Configuration files is something we have always been familiar with and with cloud services I think more and more configuration has started to move into code. But I was very intrigued by yet a different concept used by a team I worked with a while back; configuration APIs for temporary changes.

TDD helps you enforce the single responsibility principle

When I was writing last week's post I also thought about how TDD (or rather BDD) has helped me to early detect violations of the single responsibility principle.

Will TDD really drive your design?

One of the most common arguments I've heard from TDD skeptics is that TDD does not drive your design. And this statement is both true and false.

Xbox Live History

Having worked in Xbox Live I often get questions about its past.