http://benpryor.com/blog Ben Pryor's take on software engineering Thu, 27 Mar 2008 03:27:17 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I've updated the software running this blog. As a result, there were a few changes: I broke all of the permalinks to posts older than this one. Sorry about that - the search box above will help to find old posts if you're looking for something in particular. Comments made to previous ... http://benpryor.com/blog/2008/03/06/blog-update/ When designing a class for subclassing, it's important to avoid calling any method that the subclass could or must override from the superclass constructor. This includes any non-final public or protected methods (either abstract or concrete). The only methods that are appropriate to call from the superclass constructor ... http://benpryor.com/blog/2008/01/02/dont-call-subclass-methods-from-a-superclass-constructor/ Twice within the last week, I've found an easily preventable bug in my code. The problem, in both cases, was that I put a TODO comment in the code, fully intending to come back later and fix up whatever issue I put the TODO in for. If you've developed software ... http://benpryor.com/blog/2007/12/10/todos-in-code-considered-harmful/ In the fictional world of Star Trek, the Prime Directive is a principle at the heart of Starfleet and the Federation. This principle says that developing species shouldn't be interacted with until their development reaches a point at which their species can interact with the Federation as equals. ... http://benpryor.com/blog/2007/12/03/the-prime-directive-of-software-development/ When writing Java code, it's useful to differentiate between two types of targets: a "normal" environment and a "managed" environment [1]. The difference between the two is simple. In a normal environment, you (the person writing the code) call the main() method [2]. In a managed environment, ... http://benpryor.com/blog/2007/10/14/managed-environments/ When designing an API, one of the considerations you usually have to address is concurrency. In other words, for every class in the API, what is the class's threading policy? At the very minimum, an API should document how it behaves with regard to concurrent access, and even ... http://benpryor.com/blog/2007/08/15/simple-concurrency-guidelines-for-designing-apis/ In today's global software industry, character encoding issues are frequently encountered on almost all software projects. One factor that causes trouble when discussing and solving character encoding issues is terminology. In order for developers to share problems and successes with each other, a generally agreed-upon set of terms ... http://benpryor.com/blog/2007/08/05/a-layered-conceptual-model-for-character-encoding/ Every so often (more often than I'd admit) I come up with a software development book idea. This idea is almost always for a book that has no equivalent currently on the market. For a short time I dream about pitching my idea to O'Reilly, Manning, APress, or Pragmatic. However, ... http://benpryor.com/blog/2007/05/07/crazy-book-ideas/ I don't know what it is. Somehow sitting in front of the computer interferes with my thought process. This happens to me all the time. I'll be sitting at my desk, thinking through some programming problem. I'm not getting anywhere. Then I do something that makes me get up from ... http://benpryor.com/blog/2007/04/30/does-this-ever-happen-to-you/ Stop whatever you're doing for a moment, and take a look at the books on your bookshelf that you have to help you develop software. If you don't have a bookshelf or aren't a book kind of person, just play along anyway :). There's a book that should be on your ... http://benpryor.com/blog/2007/04/12/a-class-by-any-other-name/