How you should (not) learn to code

In order to achieve productivity and robustness of our applications, we are constantly introducing new coding practices, new tools, new frameworks. Consequently, with every new introduction of additional complexity we are permanently raising a bar for newcomers in programming business.

Trough time, process of learning is getting longer, required effort amount increases and we are failing to provide beginners with tools and/or methods for getting from point of not knowing anything to knowing something.

In that learning process – they are often left alone to choose any method to go trough that path by them selves. Very often, they choose wrong.

Write every application as if localization is project requirement

Vast majority (if not every) good development practice is established based on empirical studies and personal experience. One of those is “YAGNI“, as we do tend to develop more functionality and over-engineer a solution for a problem that does not exist. However, it seams that “You aren’t gonna need it” does not apply to localization.

PHP: Void and Null are (not) same thing

Sloppy code is not always a result of bad and lazy developers, sometimes, language runtime can be the one who to blame. One of the examples is PHP and how it treats “void” and “null” in non-strict mode.

Static factory pattern vs. Named constructor idiom vs Named constructor. Wait, what…?

There are several ways to construct object instance. Most common way is to use, of course, a ‘new’ keyword, however, as anything else, both theory and practice have decide to make this more complicated, and invent new fancy terms for it.

Exceptions and errors are good, not evil (interlude)

I remember that when I started to work as programmer/developer, I hated exceptions and errors. I thought that, in that point of time, everything is better than having your application run into exception message with some nasty error screen.

Today, development goal is the same, application should work flawlessly, as per design, without appearance of any error screen.

However, difference is technology advancement nowadays as well as in my maturity as a developer and acceptance of the fact that exceptions and errors have key role in achievement of application quality and development productivity. Today I appreciate exceptions and errors, I almost get excited when I see one.