Plan for tradeoffs: You can’t optimize all software quality attributes
An essential part of requirements analysis is understanding which quality characteristics are the most important so that designers can address them appropriately.
Code for a Living
We’re here to help developers at every stage of their careers.
The Great Resignation is here. What does that mean for developers?
Nearly two years into the pandemic, many Americans are reevaluating their relationship with work.
Favor real dependencies for unit testing
Which dependencies should be present in your code base? This article suggests an answer to that question.
700,000 lines of code, 20 years, and one developer: How Dwarf Fortress is built
Dwarf Fortress is one of those oddball passion projects that’s broken into Internet consciousness. It’s a free game where you play either an adventurer or a fortress full of dwarves in a randomly generated fantasy world. The simulation runs deep, with new games creating multiple civilizations with histories, mythologies, and artifacts. I reached out to him to see how he’s managed a single, growing codebase over 15+ years, the perils of pathing, and debugging dead cats. Our conversation below has been edited for clarity.
I followed my dreams and got demoted to software developer
Kristina Lustig, formerly our Director of Design, explains why she took a new role as an associate software developer.
Kristina Lustig
Associate Software Developer
What I wish I had known about single page applications
Single page apps are all the rage today, but they don't always operate the same as traditional web pages.
Don’t push that button: Exploring the software that flies SpaceX rockets and Starships
Spaceflight, from the beginning, has depended on computers – both on the ground and in the spacecraft. SpaceX has carried it to a new level. We recently spoke with Steven Gerding, Dragon’s software development lead, about the special challenges software development has for SpaceX's many missions.
Sequencing your DNA with a USB dongle and open source code
It takes the most exquisite measurements you can imagine, recording the changes in current associated with different bits of DNA.
Ben Popper
Director of Content
Best practices for writing code comments
While there are many resources to help programmers write better code—such as books and static analyzers—there are few for writing better comments. While it's easy to measure the quantity of comments in a program, it's hard to measure the quality, and the two are not necessarily correlated. A bad comment is worse than no comment at all. Here are some rules to help you achieve a happy medium.
Best practices can slow your application down
In order to get the most performant site possible when building the codebase for our public Stack Overflow site, we didn’t always follow best practices.
“This should never happen. If it does, call the developers.”
If there is one thing developers like less than writing documentation, it's responding to unnecessary escalations.
Thomas A. Limoncelli
Site Reliability Engineering Manager