“Heap, Heap, Array!”

Articles about web development and computer programming

First make the tests easy, then make the easy tests

The best time to make your software testable was at the start of the project. The second best time is now.

Illustration of trias politica with three branches of the United States (the US Capitol, the White House, and the Supreme Court). “Arrange” represents the legislative branch, “Act” the executive branch, while “Assert” is the judicial branch.

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.

Two people maintain a social distance (which is about the width of two people) from each other

How many spaces should you indent your code?

None, because tabs are better than spaces! Joking aside, it appears that the exact number doesn’t matter that much.

Everything that management needs to know about technical debt

Developers often complain about technical debt, but how much does it really hurt the business? According to this study it’s *a lot*.

Someone has removed a brick from the Colosseum

How developers perceive and deal with architecture erosion

Let’s talk about architecture erosion, its causes and consequences, and how developers can identify and control it.

Why snake_case is better than camelCase

There aren’t many reasons why you should choose snake_case over camelCase, but the ones that are there are pretty convincing.

Why camelCase is better than snake_case

Does it matter whether you use camelCase or snake_case for identifiers? Yes it does! Probably. Maybe.

A checklist for controlled program comprehension experiments

If you want to study the effect of something on the understability of code, you need a controlled experiment. What are things to do or avoid?

Who is this Pokémon still, with a silhouette of a Pokémon that is clearly not a Pikachu.

What is the best programming language for beginners?

This study attempts to provide a more nuanced answer than “JavaScript”, from an educator’s perspective.

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?

Kevin’s small talk scene from The Office

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.

A heart, sandwiched between two Dutch chocolate letters I and U, forming the phrase “I love u”

Is there a time and place for single-letter variable names?

We are often told that variable names should be meaningful and avoid abbreviations, yet some variables are simply named “k”. What gives?

A hand with some dice. One die has an “X” on it, which is commonly associated with the “Doubt” action in L.A. Noire

Casting doubt on the ability of tools to measure technical debt

Numbers produced by technical debt tools tell a tale, but it’s largely fictional.

Two border agents examine a little girl’s backpack that has some Arabic text on it.

What do regular expression bugs look like?

This study gives us a better understanding of the practical problems faced by developers when using regular expressions.

Do Java developers write better Python? Studying off-language code quality on GitHub

What happens when you let Java and C++ developers write Python code?

“The March of Progress”, documenting the evolution from “No homo” to “Homo sapiens”

Does code structure affect comprehension? On using and naming intermediate variables

The answer is not “yes” or “no”, but somewhere in between. Who would’ve guessed?

What it would take to use mutation testing in industry – A study at Facebook

Mutation testing is useful, but not many developers use it. What steps can we take to increase adoption?

Pam Beesly, in the “They’re the same picture” scene

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.

Cavemen try to ride up a hill in a car made of stone

Old habits die hard: Why refactoring for understandability does not give immediate benefits

Refactoring code improves code maintainability, reusability, and other “ilities”, but does not speed up development – at least not at first.

People on a running track. One person is lying on the ground.

How to run PHPUnit tests in PhpStorm

A tutorial for people who keep forgetting how to run PHPUnit tests using PhpStorm.

A whizz-kid, a sysadmin, a fresh graduate, and an idiot hold up number signs

Measuring programming experience

Studies about programming often need to control for programming experience. What’s the best way to do that?

Ruler that tells you how much your code sucks using emojis

An empirical validation of cognitive complexity as a measure of source code understandability

There’s a new way to measure the understandability of your source code and this time it actually seems to work reasonably well.

The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly – TikTok edition

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.