Avoid Invalid State
Have you seen classes with a method isValid() or something similar? You most definitely have seen and even used such classes. Maybe you have even written such a method yourself. […]
Clean Code
Who are we Writing Code for?
Since my blog touches clean code topics a lot, I often mention maintainability. In turn, readability plays a major part in maintainability, since what we can’t read properly, we can’t analyze, debug, fix, refactor and extend properly either. But who defines what is readable and what is not?
Clean up the Build
Every now and then we have to change something in our build procedure, and more often than not those changes are a real pain. Build scripts are the step children of many software projects. Someone wrote them, nobody cares much about them, they just work and build the project. Until they don’t.
Encapsulating APIs
Have you ever seen a codebase crawling with `DWORD_PTR`, `HANDLE` and similar types? I bet it was a Windows application which never has been (and probably never will be) ported to another operating System, because it had fallen victim to a leaky or nonexistent encapsulation of WinAPI.
Passing containers as out-parameters
Sometimes I see functions that are meant to return a range of values, but instead of returning a container, they take one as out-parameter. There are several reasons why that […]
Comments Mean Failure
I don’t like comments, because having to comment a piece of code means the code itself does not express everything there is to know.
The Perfect Code
A few days ago I came across a tweet in my twitter timeline that made me think and spawned a little discussion: @diegorlosada Programming is one of the few fields […]
Evolving a Framework
We use frameworks all the time. Some are part of third party libraries, others are self made. What options do we have if requirements change, especially for the custom frameworks?
Singletons – What’s the Deal?
If you like a heated discussion, just pick a few developers and start a conversation about singletons. Sentiments and opinions about that particular design pattern are all over the place. For […]
Simple and Clean Code vs. Performance
One of C++s strengths is that it is possible to write very performant code. But does that mean we always have to worry about performance and write our everyday code as […]