Since extension methods were introduced to .NET in 2007, how to use them appropriately has always been a source of debate amongst its programmers. For those of you unfamiliar with them, the extension method feature…
For awhile now, I’ve been following a Twitter account called Programming Wisdom. I’ve always enjoyed the daily dose of sage advice and inside-programming humor from them. I did a double-take recently when they tweeted a quote…
Few things are more maddening than standing around idly while we wait for something to happen. It’s been proven through experiments, surveys, and numerous real-world examples. The solutions to the problem of waiting are often surprising. For…
There’s a book that’s grown a cult-like following over the past couple of years that you may be familiar with called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. It probably belongs in its own genre somewhere between…
After he bought a small stake in 37signals a few years back, Jeff Bezos gave some heady advice to their founders about building a successful business: “Find the things that won’t change in your business and invest heavily…
For me, programming almost always feels like working simultaneously inside two different worlds. First, there is the world in which we craft software. It is arduous work. The work that no one else sees. Nonetheless, it…
In last week’s blog post, I showed you how we use Lucene.Net, a code library and document database we use to manage DoneDone’s search catalog. I detailed how we structure the documents in our database…
This is the first of a two-part post on how we built DoneDone’s global search catalog. In this post, we’ll take a look at the software we use to power our global search, how queries work, and how…
Whenever I start on a large refactoring, I need to justify that the exercise is truly worthwhile. Am I objectively and unequivocally improving the understandability of the codebase? If I’ve finished and the codebase is no more…
For nearly two decades, I’ve been writing some form of code. But, the primary reason I code has changed over time. In the beginning, I wrote code simply to make something real. It was empowering to finally…