About

My name is Christopher Bojarski. I'm a web developer, programmer and blogger. Fan of all things technology related. Avid reader and traveler. Married and living in Philadelphia. Connect with me at cbojar.net.

Popular posts from this blog

Every Case Is Special

Special cases are everywhere. This one little thing has to work this other way. Soon, there is an if/else chain twenty conditions long. Worse, that if/else chain is embedded in another chain of twelve conditions, all in one happy method. The next person making a kind of change has to tack on another condition and hope nothing blows up.

We know it's bad when we see a bird's nest like that. How can we deal with it? Why should we? The problem with code no one understands is that no one understands it. We will have a huge problem the day it stops working. We assume that, if it works now, it will work forever. That is a faulty assumption. The world changes around us. The solid rock beneath that code can erode away. And our hair will be on fire when that day comes.

Special cases are special. Normal cases are also special. Every case is special in some way. There are some classic special cases common to many code bases. There are quirky special cases unique to your own code. We need …
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Bug Hunts: Better Together

Bugs are demoralizing. Bugs are draining. Bugs are frustrating. Bugs suck.

Nobody really wants to have bugs, and nobody really wants to be the one who has to track them down. Bugs are a reality of software development. They happen in even the most meticulously managed software. They always seem to come from the obscure or not-understood part of the code. They give error messages that make no sense and are completely unhelpful. I'm looking at you, NullPointerException and equivalents.

Getting assigned bug tickets is the software development equivalent to latrine duty. It is a necessary task that needs done, but no one wants to do it. A developer could spend hours or even days banging their head on their desk just trying to figure out what could possibly be causing the error. All the while, they are not creating new business value.

For some team members, finding where the bug is coming from is easiest. For others, discovering what is causing the software to get into a bad state in t…
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Making Wrong Code Be Wrong

I was recently perusing when I came across a link to a Joel Spolsky blog post. In it, he describes how a form of Hungarian notation can be used to make wrong code look wrong. In the process, he describes the interesting history of how Hungarian notation came to be, and how the common use of it today was not the way it was originally intended.

He describes how Hungarian notation was created to convey application-level information about a variable. It could be used to distinguish between two different types of dimensions that might both be typed as ints. He termed this Apps Hungarian. While the compiler could not tell them apart, the human eye would be able to with a cursory glance. Later, the notation was instead conflated with the type that the compiler saw. An int iWidth carried redundant information that could actually get in the way if the type ever needed to change. He termed this Systems Hungarian.

He gives several examples in the post. Notably, he describes how Apps Hungarian ca…
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