CodingClues

This has been originally published on tomcat.ranta.info on May 21, 2008.

I know I should be hard at work, but… it took only 10 minutes! And sometimes I should really scratch that programming itch when it comes along…

Yesterday I did some reading and talking on the Debian OpenSSL desaster. guruz brought in an interesting website on random number visualization.

I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t help but think that PRNGs can’t be that bad. Or at least they wouldn’t be this bad in Linux, where timing and attributes of mouse and keyboard activity, disk I/O operations and specific interrupts are used as entropy sources.

Read more…

The following has been originally posted here and here on June 13th and 14th, 2005.

There are two things I want to say about this shot.

Read more…

The following might be totally obvious, but to me it was a revelation, so why not publish it.

There are situations when you have methods returning a collection.
A Java collection can be a set (no sorting, no duplicates), a list (sorting, duplicates) or a map (association key/value).

In some cases, the method might fail.
To have robust code, you would still like to return an empty set, list or collection instead of null.

Read more…

Today, I had some time to spend on my new open source movie collection web application, MovDB2.
I did some thinking about infrastructure, and collected my decisions on the project wiki.

The thing is: Most of these decisions have been done more or less arbitrarily.
I’ll list my available options and my reasoning behind the choice.
The problem I want to highlight is: How do you actually choose the right infrastructure for a new project?

Read more…

Lately, I have started becoming more and more interested in job interviews. Part of that might be because I’m in the finishing run of my diploma thesis, and so I’ll likely start my first real job the next months.

NOOP.NL has an article on the perfect job interview question. A question that can single-handedly decide the fate of an interviewee (at least at the linked shop ;)).

The question: When reviewing somebody else’s code, what is it that you usually find most disturbing?
Some people will rant about a programming style guide, but few will mention the architecture.

I found the reasoning behind it all the more interesting. The thing is, while architecture is obviously a pet field I love to be in, I think I wouldn’t have given it as answer to the “perfect question”: In most situations, you can’t even determine the system architecture from just looking at one person’s code.

Maybe the question is just short on details. The question is interesting, the answer to why it is important is kinda non-negotiable, but the process of weeding people out solely because of their answer to this is… well… questionable.