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Agilefall: gracefully delivering (some part of) a project on a fixed deadline
IT consulting is an odd place to be when it comes to software engineering practices. We often end up writing software for business groups that have fixed budgets and more importantly fixed deadlines....
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Of null VARCHAR fields and empty strings
How to represent a blank user input is a reasonably innocent design question. On a couple occasions though I have been bitten by systems that have been designed without considering that question...
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Repository pattern overuse: The double repository with Microsoft Entity...
Martin Folwer’s blog and website is a common reference for modern design pattern so we will start with his glossary definition for the repository pattern. The linked article contains more detail, but...
View ArticleUsing Olingo ODataJS 4 Beta with AngularJS and Web API OData V4
Recently I started writing a new web application which uses OData V4 as the protocol for passing data to back and forth between the JavaScript client and ASP.Net server. The client is written using...
View ArticleThe importance of being mindful of operator precedence
Operator precedence determines the order unary and binary operators are executed. In many situations, knowing basic mathematical operator precedence (for +,-,*, etc) is enough. In other situations not...
View ArticleLoops in NodeJS
I’ve written before about how it’s better to write straightforward code than trying to be clever and pre-optimize. Another example of where this rule is true is the cost of iteration between different...
View ArticleLoading a Cocos Studio scene into cocos2d-x 3.4/3.5
In the last few weeks I have been slowly learning about the cocos2d-x framework. cocos2d-x is a C++ based cross platform game engine. The makers of the engine also produce a UI creation GUI called...
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SRV records as service locators
Recently I began work on a project to manage the deployment of a product built using a microservices architecture. As a result of our chosen architecture we have a large number of services which will...
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Logging and Monitoring
Operational monitoring of a software application is one of the activities the ensures a successful public launch. Too often it seems like a service’s course to public availability looks something like,...
View ArticleNodeJS modules should export object constructors
Note I didn’t say always should export objects, but for the sanity of everyone involved, in many cases a required module should return a constructor and not a fully instantiated object. Today’s post is...
View ArticleBuilding it wrong and wronger
A 1st generation software product will likely miss the mark. It might have missed being that best that it could be by costing too much, being too complex, or just not targeting the right market. In any...
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Class hierarchy design
For the love of all that is dear to software development avoid parallel but separate class hierarchies. Today we’re going to talk a little bit about type hierarchy design and why composition is useful...
View ArticleNodeJS counter implementation
Performance counters can be implemented in applications to help operators determine where bottlenecks are in the design. Microsoft has a decent page, that’s somewhat Windows centric, about performance...
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