The Programmer's Paradox

The strength and utility of any software system is the data that it persists.Persisting junk data is just wasting resources and making it harder to utilize any good data you have collected.Storing partial information is also bad. If you should have c...

It’s a simple idea.  Anywhere you go in this world, you can prove that you have some attribute. But at the very same time, absolutely all other information about you remains private. The inquirer gets nothing but an opaque token. Its existence...

I know the term data-driven has been used before, but I want to ignore that and redefine it as a means of developing code.So, you have some code to write.Step 1: Figure out all of the data that may be used by the code. Not some of the data, or parts...

For a long time, I have been attempting to write something specific about how to decompose code into reasonable functions. The industry takes this to be an entirely subjective issue. Programming styles go through waves. Sometimes the newest gene...

Even if I know that I will end up building something extremely complex, I never start there.When we get a complex problem to solve, we are taught to decompose that into pieces. But often that is not enough to get something sophisticated to work corre...

“One of these things is not like the others” -- Sesame StreetSymmetry is an often ignored property of code that is incredibly helpful when editing or debugging. It is part of readability, along with naming and structuring.If you do a quick visual...

In software development, we create a lot of variables and data structures for our code that we toss around all over the place.Into these we put data, lots of it.Some of that data originates from far away. It is not our data. Some of that data is a re...