Yesterday, I came across a fabulous talk by Bryan Cantrill at GOTO 2017 with the topic of “Debugging Under Fire: Keep your Head when systems have Lost their Mind”. It’s a very interesting and entertaining talk, so I highly recommend to watch it in full. I never really heard this simple definition of debugging: Debugging […]
Category: Engineering
How To Report Bugs Effectively
As software engineer, you will write and receive many bug reports over the years. When bugs are reported with low quality, everyone loses, as the reporter will be asked “annoying” questions, the software engineer has to spend extra time to find out all the details, and overall the eventual fix will be delayed. Here are […]
Stop Naming Systems “Legacy”
While according to Merriam-Webster “legacy” is described as “relating to, or being a previous or outdated computer system” and Wikipedia adds “yet still in use”, I feel like we software developers and especially software architects are too hastily in naming a system or sub-system legacy. From a high-level architecture point of view, which spans across […]
.NET Day Switzerland 2022
Update 13.01.2023: Added slides In the beginning of 2020 the early bird tickets for the .NET Day Switzerland went on sale. Nobody knew of course, how early bird these tickets were, as it took two additional years until I could finally present mine, while entering the Arena cinema here in Zürich three weeks ago. Keynote: […]
Right Balance Between Simple and Complex
A while ago, Vittorio tweeted the article “In defense of complicated programming languages” and the same way it resonated with him, so did it with me and I wanted to share a few thoughts. Show Don’t Tell The first part the author articulates very well, that it’s important for people and especially new beginners, to […]
You Are Not Wasting Time
On the SFML Discord and forum, I get to mentor and support a lot of new beginners, often with some of their first steps in programming. It’s not uncommon that they feel like wasting their time, because they can’t figure something out and spend hours or days on it. I think every programmer, myself included, […]
Article on Error Handling
Yesterday, I came across this interesting article Handling errors is canceling operations. While it’s mostly focused on C++, I found most of it being generic enough, that it also fits with other languages. The most interesting section to me, was the following paragraph: Exception handling is not a tool for broadcasting information about any failure in […]
Blocking Ads in Skype and Viber
I’m not a fan of advertisement, be it on a website or in some application. For websites, we have quite a few options by now – I currently use uBlock Origin. But when companies include ads in an application itself, the options to block it, get a bit more complicated.
When VLC Doesn’t Update Anymore
Most of us probably ran into a bug in some application at one point. Sometimes it’s not very obvious, e.g. a random crash, while other times you may know that, if you for example perform certain five steps it will crash. But what do you do when you find an issue? Do you just avoid […]
Recursive Algorithm
Now that we’ve looked at what an algorithm is, we can go a bit deeper and take on one of the most common section of algorithms: Recursion Recursive algorithms are actually quite easy to understand and we often use it intuitively in our daily life. Recursion only means, that a function calls itself. To illustrate […]