What does a good exception message look like?

Today I have to bring up a great article that is over a year old. They topic is what exception messages really should look like. As bonus I would like to increase the scope of the discussion to also include log messages and test failures.

Alternatives to hydrating IEnumerables

You should know that whenever you get an IEnumerable you should only enumerate it twice as some implementations don't allow you to enumerate it twice. Normally you don't get an error the second time - just no more items. But what is really the best way to handle this?

Assigning vs picking tasks

If you have followed this blog for a while you know how important I think the choice of words are. But the difference between assigning and picking tasks within a team might be bigger than than you think.

Don't hold me accountable for old opinions

Once in a while I get a comment about something I wrote a long time ago and sometimes that is embarrassing as the opinion I expressed a while back might not be how I feel today on that subject. Hence I decided to look into some old blog posts and see how bad it is...

Linux performance investigation in 60 seconds

Since it is new year's eve I'm going to make it easy for myself.

Your new BFF

I think it was a few years ago when Netflix blogged about how each client had their own server component and how this made the client development easier. A few weeks ago I read about this again in the context of micro services. The term Backend For Frontend (BFF) was coined.

Yet Another Code Coverage Rant

Instead of me ranting over why code coverage measurements can be good but in general are used in the wrong way; why don't I let somebody else do it for me...

Do I need to remove the Server header from my HTTP responses?

You might have heard the recommendation that your web server should not return the Server header to reveal exactly what software is being used. It even says so in the RFC. Given how hard it was to remove the Server header when using .Net HttpListener you might wonder what is really the right thing to do here.

Web service scale testing

When I say web service scale testing I mean testing to figure out how many instances of your service you need. This type of testing is really easy to explain but typically hard to get right.

Yet another retrospective idea: Successes, Frustrations and Opportunities

During a training I was teaching recently we were talking about retrospectives and different ways to make them interesting. Afterwards one of the students came forward and suggested something interesting.