A Case for Guard Clauses

One of my pet peeves in programming is that few people use guard clauses. A guard clause is an almost trivial concept that greatly improves readability. Inside a method, handle your special cases right away and return immediately.

Development Done Right

In my projects, I’ve always been the one who took care of infrastructure, standardization and quality assurance from the development perspective. The funny thing is that I’m no admin and no QA guy, so most of it wasn’t even my job. In this article, I’m going to list a few things that in my opinion [...]

Saving Session Data in Web Applications

There are many ways to store session data in web applications. They all differ in scalability, failover capabilities, and complexity. I’ll give you a quick rundown on the major themes.

Efficient Development Environment Setup

Development environments and their configuration can become quite complex. It’s not unusual that a complete workstation setup takes half a day or more and requires extensive help from other project members. Using virtual machines for the runtime environment can help to reduce setup and maintenance costs.

Professional Deployment and Operation of Web Applications

There are millions of web applications on the Internet that are under constant development. Paying software developers to work on bug fixes and new features is quite expensive already, but what’s often neglected is the cost for deployment and operation. Well-run organizations invest in their deployment and runtime infrastructure and are rewarded with reduction of [...]

Why Do We Build Web Applications?

Creating a good user interface is no trivial task, no matter if it’s running as a desktop application or inside a browser. When it comes to accessing server-side resources (a common thing in the corporate world) web applications seem to be the first choice nowadays. You have complete control over deployment and in theory platform [...]

Thoughts on Collective Code Ownership

Agile software development methodologies like Extreme Programming (XP) propagate collective code ownership: Every developer is allowed (and encouraged) to make changes wherever necessary. But is this really a realistic, useful approach?

A Metadata Format For CSV Files

Using CSV files in batch processing applications has many advantages, most prominently interoperability between programming languages and tools. One of its weaker points is data integrity though. The format has no way to declare data types or additional metadata other than assigning names to data fields using a header.
The simple metadata format proposed in this [...]