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Category Archives: General Programming Tips

The Eclipse IDE  has built in what they call task tags.  These are little tags in the comments that indicate that something needs to still be done.  An example of this is the popular TODO tag.  I see a lot of people using this tag, and sometimes, even IDEs add them in for you.  Eclipse [...]

I remember a little while ago I wrote a post about hosts files, which are handy things for every web developer. Modifying your hosts files allows you to redirect requests to a given domain to a specific IP address. For example, you can have 16bit.orderinchaos.org redirect to your localhost (127.0.0.1) or another testing server, allowing [...]

This post isn’t going to get too deep into the theory behind hash tables. I just thought I’d refresh my own memory by writing a post. Hashing and hash tables actually came up in a meeting yesterday. I was excited to actually use those memories again, but I was ashamed at how corrupted my memory [...]

Whenever you start a new project, one of your big tasks is to decide what programming language to use.  This usually turns into a fairly involved discussion about the needs of the project, and the various attributes of the possible languages.  I’m not going to start a flame war by telling you that one particular [...]

see more Epic Fails Okay, normally I try to steer away from echoing the mindlessness of the internet here, but this seemed appropriate. It also made me think – yeah, developers are definitely vulnerable to this. I suppose the upside is that usually our copy-paste mistakes rarely get seen by the real world, as they [...]

I was once working on a project with a small group of people.  We had a need to sort some data, a common task in software development.  (So common, in fact, that many languages include a collection of sorting algorithms with their core distribution.)  A co-worker has the assignment to get the data sorted, among [...]

Many of you have probably heard of Google’s Innovation Time Off, or their 20% time.  For those of you who haven’t, Google allows their software guys to take 20% of their time, the equivalent of one day a week, and put it towards any sort of pet projects they want to. Now, I’m sure there [...]

One of the nicest things about programming is that there is an absolutely endless supply of examples and tutorials on the web to help you when you get stuck. Unfortunately, all too often, I’ve seen programmers find a piece of code that does what they’re looking for, and they simply copy and paste it into [...]

I have long been a fan of StatCounter for keeping track of who is visiting my sites.  Now, I’m not going to say that StatCounter is the only good choice for monitoring web traffic.  I am aware of several others that do a nice job as well.  Instead, I want to let you all know about an [...]

While I don’t have any statistics to back me up, I’d guess that the number one killer of software is the Moving Target.  Usually, a software project starts with a person or group of people deciding on what the program should do.  Then there is a period of designing the software, which is sometimes long, [...]

Perhaps you have heard the phrase “Release Early, Release Often” before.  This phrase is one of the key components of Linux, and a whole slew of open source projects.  The idea is that instead of getting a fully functional version of your software, and thoroughly testing it before releasing it to your users, you make [...]

It seems like a while ago, my voicemail always used to tell me “You have 1 new messages, and 4 old messages.”  Thanks Voicemail.   You sound so intelligent when you say “1 messages”. I was thinking that this kind of thing was going away.  Until today.  I was just using Google Reader and saw this message: [...]

I recently planned a competition for programmers, similar to the Inter-Collegiate Programming Competition (ICPC).  We created a number of problems for the contestants to complete which each required getting input, processing it, and producing output.  Rather than dealing with a pile of code for reading from and writing to files, we told them to read [...]