Tag Archives: design

Keep Things the "Same"

This general design principle does not mean to never change anything, but to consciously create a paradigm where the same things have the same names and are accessed in the same way as much as possible.

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Abstraction and Encapsulation

Abstraction and encapsulation are opposite sides of the same coin, and essential to good object oriented software design.  Why the, is there a tendency of some programmers to go in exactly the opposite direction?  This trend and its implication is … Continue reading

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When are "best practices" less than best?

A “best practice” is a heuristic which is used to guide early stages of a project, in order to set some patterns.  When should you use them?  More important: when are you justified in ignoring a best practice?

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Incremental Development

I happened across this excellent and perfect depiction of incremental development.  The image addresses on of the key flaws in thinking that lead some agile projects to fail.  So let’s discuss a bit.

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Don't Fear the Lowly Static Method

When people first learn object oriented programming (is there any other way) they seem to want to abandon all non-member methods (such as static methods) as being anti-object-oriented. This is foolish. There are times for objects, and times for static … Continue reading

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Specifying Business Hours

Long ago I worked on a project where we needed to specify the hours that a business was going to be open, and to account for all the various difficulties around holidays and other special days. This is what we … Continue reading

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Security Absolutism is the Enemy of Security Improvement

Security is an important topic and everyone knows it.  This post is about a curious social behavior around implementing security procedures that often works against incremental improvement of security.

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Robust Web Application Initialization

When a web based application starts up, it should do so carefully to avoid a number of problems.  This post outlines the problems you might run into, and a list of coding preparations that can be made to avoid these … Continue reading

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Error Message should be clear, plain, and direct

This post is about a real error message I received and puzzled through.  Luckily, because I was working with open source code, I was able to see a copy of the source, and only then did I understand what the … Continue reading

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Usability Means Well-Behaved, even when the User Isn't

Users of a program found that sometimes, when they went to log in, they did not get a place to enter the username & password.  Instead of the normal login prompt, they got a blank screen, and it was completely … Continue reading

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