“Heap, Heap, Array!”

Articles about web development and computer programming

Migrating to GraphQL: A practical assessment

Facebook’s GraphQL looks very promising, but is it ready for primetime?

Peculiar house with an indoor fireworks kit and an outdoor pool without a way to exit it

Uncovering architectural design decisions

Poorly documented code can tell you what it does, but not what why. Issue trackers can help you rediscover that “why”.

A completely empty highway

Studying the impact of adopting continuous integration on the delivery time of pull requests

Continuous integration should make everything faster, but it can actually slow things down too.

Lady Justice weighs two object designs against each other

How do design decisions affect the distribution of software metrics?

The authors of this week’s paper built a tool that can infer the design role of classes and let it analyse some Java projects.

A professor draws two variants of the test-driven development process on a blackboard

Does it really matter to test-first or to test-last?

Debunking some myths about the effectiveness of test-driven development.

Travis’ girlfriend likes Jenkins more

I’m leaving you, Travis: A continuous integration breakup story

What makes people abandon their continuous integration service?

A customer falls off their chair when the waiter hands them their restaurant bill

The pricey bill of technical debt: When and by whom will it be paid?

Everyone keeps talking about how technical debt is bad, but how bad is it really?

An enlightened Python master teaches disciples about the zen of Python

On the usage of Pythonic idioms

Ways to ensure that all code is equal and no code is more equal than others.

A group of gnomes use a Surface Studio to edit a PHP script that outputs lyrics for Duck Sauce’s Barbra Streisand

Micro-clones in evolving software

Duplicate code. Duplicate code everywhere.

Harvard Business School’s Baker Library / Bloomberg Center gets a new European post-war addition

Are developers aware of the architectural impact of their changes?

I mean, surely this tiny addition is not going to have any noticeable effect on the system’s architecture?

IT Crowd’s Moss awkwardly holds a fire extinguisher that’s on fire

Are code examples on an online Q&A forum reliable? A study of API misuse on Stack Overflow

I actually don’t know anyone who blindly copies stuff from Stack Overflow, but apparently it’s a thing.

A model marionette is being controlled for a show that’s viewed by a theatre audience

Code smells for model-view-controller architectures

Here’s a list of six things you should not do in an MVC architecture.

A KLM Royal Dutch Airlines Dreamliner expects to arrive 20 minutes earlier

Predicting estimated time of arrival for commercial flights

Achieving better ETA prediction using machine learning.

Impossible teapot on a table

A large-scale empirical study on linguistic antipatterns affecting APIs

Does it matter if your method names contain tiny linguistic mistakes? Possibly.

An archaeologist investigates some unusual hieroglyphs inside an Egyptian tomb

Automatically assessing code understandability: How far are we?

Forget LOC and cyclomatic complexity; can we just calculate the understandability of code directly?

Some Buy ORM employees trying to retrieve something for the customer in an inefficient way

How not to structure your database-backed web applications

ORM frameworks make your life a lot easier, but can just as easily lead to performance problems.

Two programmers with the dreaded wait cursor and beach ball in their heads

Do you remember this source code?

I’ll tell you what, I don’t even remember writing this article.

A very simple to use interface that is accompanied by a way too elaborate manual, and a complex interface that only comes with an empty sticky note

When not to comment: Questions and tradeoffs with API documentation for C++ projects

You want comments in your code, but probably not too many.

Developers queueing in line to have their code reviewed by an Arstotzka inspector

Characteristics of useful code reviews: An empirical study at Microsoft

Some tips that can help you streamline your code review pipeline.

Turrets being accepted or rejected on an assembly line

The impact of code review coverage and code review participation on software quality

You know about code coverage for tests, but code review coverage is just as important.

Kitchen with a flip clock, a calendar, and an analog wall clock

Datetime formatting in Go

Go’s time package takes a novel approach to defining datetime serialisation formats. Is it an improvement over existing alternatives?