Category Archives: Programming

Don’t Throw Away Things That Are Still Useful

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This has to do with my personal life as much as it does programming. While writing a program we often go through many iterations of what we are creating or how to solve individual issues. While, many of these ideas won’t be used in the final program, it is still worth keeping some record of them.

A couple of ways to do this are to use a notebook to work through your ideas. As you change your ideas or come up with new ideas, simply turn the page and start again. This will allow you to keep your old ideas (ideally with dates written by them), while you explore new ideas or solutions. When the notebook is full simply put it on the shelf and start another. Notebooks don’t take up much space and the are relatively cheap to purchase.

I couldn’t begin to list the times that I have run across old notes and they inspired a solution to a new problem that I was having. The same can be true for you. It just takes a bit of a change in how you do things.

A Day of Play – It’s Important to Branch Out.

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Today was a bit of a lazy day. That is something that is important to do at times. I played some video games, but I also dragged out my Arduinos and other electronics and played a bit. More time was spent sorting through what I had, but it was still a good thing to do. Hopefully, I will be able to get a few projects to work with that.

I do some photography, Lego building, writing, models, and even a bit of painting. I find the creativity of these other interests feeds the creativity needed to program.

So, for today this will be shorter than usual (yes, I know most of my posts have been short). Make sure you step out of your usual activities and experiment with new things. Learning and stretching yourself will never let you down.

Programming Suggestion of the Day: Test Test Test!

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Assuming things work just because you can run a program and not have it crash is a sure path to failure.

If you are using automating testing, that will catch a lot of issues before they become a problem – provided that you did a good job with your test coverage. But, either way run your program many times. Make sure to test every option, or combination of options. Try things that don’t make sense – put words in a number field. Try to break your program, and when you are done with that get it in front of other people and let them attempt to break it also.

Only then can you begin to feel confident that your program will do what you expect it to do and users won’t run into issues.

Well, I should back off that last statement – errors will still manage to show up and people will find them like magic. It is amazing how many things manage to get missed even after thorough testing.

So, just keep testing. Even if you think you’ve tried everything, try a few more things.