Technology Commentary

The Good & The Bad

What is Kotlin? This article explores how the Android language works, its key features and use cases, and the skills needed to navigate it.

How to combine Terraform, Crossplane and Atlantis to provide the best qualities of each with the flexibility to implement strict Day 2 governance.

What app development teams most often want are tools to enable their speed and autonomy. To not only build, test and deploy with less friction, but to be able to understand what’s going on in their apps.

We will release SQLMate soon, join the waiting list to get updated

A CTO's guide to securing Elixir and Phoenix.

I've been in the software game for almost 30 years professionally, with another 10 dabbling in programming. I'm one of those who think anyone can code, but creating a software product...

Platform engineering takes the load off developers who already face cognitive overload. At KubeCon in Chicago, Release's CEO told how his company's tooling seeks to make complexity simpler.

Lisp is one of the oldest programming languages still in use today, but it has evolved in multiple directions over its more than 60-year history. Two of the more prominent descendants, Common Lisp and Emacs Lisp (or Elisp), are fairly closely related at some level, but there is still something of a divide between them. Some recent discussion in the emacs-devel mailing list have shown that some elements from Common Lisp are not completely welcome in Elisp—at least in the code that is maintained by the Emacs project itself.

Going forward, the project will go with a different release model, based on two release types: experimental and standard.

Read how we built a flexible, high-performance columnar compression mechanism for PostgreSQL to add scalability to our favorite database.

It's easy to interpret any criticism of the hacker ethic—which is what I'm about to do—as a kind of assault.

Kind of high level, but good summary of the key players / market share in observability from Barclays (Observability Industry Review: Volume 7, October 2023. Sorry, no public link). Would be intere…

Mention the words "maintenance programming" to a group of developers and they'll, to a man (or woman), recoil in horror. Maintenance programming is widely viewed as janitorial work. But maybe that's an unfair characterization. In Software Conflict 2.0 : The Art and Science of Software Engineering [http://www.amazon.com/

Coding has always felt to me like an endlessly deep and rich domain. Now I find myself wanting to write a eulogy for it.

Data science is a relatively new term for a relatively old discipline. Essentially, it is data analysis, particularly for large data sets. It involves techniques as wide-ranging as statistics, comp…

New Relic is extending its APM platform to make it simpler to monitor the behavior of AI models within the context of an application.

The 5G Home Broadband is booming. However, the journey of fixed wireless access has neither been simple, easy, nor cheap. This recent boom teaches us a big lesson: the unpredictable and often arduo…

Programming book reviews, programming tutorials,programming news, C#, Ruby, Python,C, C++, PHP, Visual Basic, Computer book reviews, computer history, programming history, joomla, theory, spreadsheets and more.

Successful transitions and accelerated adoption both hinge on the collaborative efforts of governments and key internet players.

There's a coding convention known as "Yoda conditions" that imparts a valuable lesson in preventing subtle bugs and fostering cleaner code. Named after the wise and syntax-flipping Yoda from Star Wars these conditions involve reversing the typical order of comparison in expressions. Let's delve into the wisdom behind Yoda conditions and why they are embraced by developers. What are Yoda Conditions? In traditional conditional statements you might see comparisons written as variable == constant . However Yoda conditions flip this order presenting the constant first: constant == variable . The unconventional style is intentional and serves a specific purpose. The Wisdom Behind Yoda Conditions 1. Guarding Against Accidental Assignment: Consider the following scenario: if (x = 5): # This is syntactically valid but assigns 5 to x instead of checking equality # This can lead to unintended behavior and difficult-to-find bugs # Yoda conditions guard against such accidental assignments On the other hand: if (5 = x): # Results in a syntax error catching the mistake early in development # Yoda conditions provide a safety net against accidental assignments By placing the constant on the left a syntax error is triggered if a single equals sign is mistakenly used instead of a double equals sign for comparison. 2. Improved Readability: Proponents of Yoda conditions argue that they enhance code readability. The unconventional structure draws attention to the constant making it clearer that a comparison is taking place. This can be especially helpful when scanning code quickly reducing the chance of misinterpreting the intention of the statement. Conclusion: In the coding universe Yoda conditions serve as a small but powerful tool to prevent subtle bugs and improve code maintainability. While coding styles can vary embracing the wisdom of Yoda conditions contributes to a cleaner safer and more readable codebase. May the force of consistent and clear coding conventions be with you!

Learning from the past without trying to live in it.