How to write good code comments
In this latest instalment of “Things That People Don’t Want To Bother With” I discuss best practices for writing comments in source code.
“Heap, Heap, Array!”
How many unit tests should you write?
How many unit tests are enough? As always the answer is “It depends”, but fortunately there is a handy rule of thumb that you can use!
The Chicago and London schools of TDD
Tests can be written Chicago-style or London-style. Neither is strictly better than the other; which style should you use?
Structure your tests using the Arrange-Act-Assert pattern
Arrange-Act-Assert is a standardised approach to writing tests that makes them easier to read and helps you avoid some bad practices.
Storing trees in a database table
Relational databases are very good at storing tabular data, but what if you need to store arbitrarily-sized trees?
How to deal with Dutch compound words when processing text
The Dutch have a lot of long words that aren’t in dictionaries. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re hard to read for Dutch people.
When and how to JOIN a table with itself
Relational databases make it very easy to join data from different tables, but did you know you can also JOIN data within the same table?
How do you number SELECT query results using SQL?
Want to let number or rank your query results? Let your database do the hard work for you.
How to run PHPUnit tests in PhpStorm
A tutorial for people who keep forgetting how to run PHPUnit tests using PhpStorm.
MDX: The good, the bad, and the ugly
If you have your own blog and like the simplicity of Markdown, but don’t want to give up JSX, you may want to give MDX a try.
Allonsay’s language classification algorithm
How you can detect the language of texts, without using the “ML” word.
Finding the most common words in a set of texts for a word cloud
Alternatively: why word counting is nothing like bean counting.
(Not) looping over lists in PHP
This post discusses three common array functions: map, reduce, and filter.
Datetime formatting in Go
Go’s time package takes a novel approach to defining datetime serialisation formats. Is it an improvement over existing alternatives?