Category Archives: Software Engineering

Delegation

April 9th, 2023

Delegation is a good design choice only when it simplifies more than it complicates. (Gamma et al. 21) Work Cited: Gamma, Erich, et al. Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Addison-Wesley, 1994.

Exceptions vs. Error Return Codes

April 26th, 2019

I have been partly responsible for maintaining legacy source code. Almost all of the code is implemented in C and therefore does not use exceptions. Much of the error handling code follows the following pattern here implemented in C++ (imagine in this example, operator new returns 0 when no memory is available): int function() { […]

Optimization

December 16th, 2011

Lately, I have been involved with optimizing code to improve execution time. I am still becoming familiar with a large and complex software system that is used by a multitude of end-users. Because my knowledge of the system is limited and people are dependent on the system, the scope of my modifications is focused on […]

Write Less Code

August 27th, 2010

I have recently come across multiple sources that recommended writing less code or just enough code to get the job done. Fewer lines of source code mean fewer lines of code that needs to be documented, tested, and maintained. In a situation where lines of code is not being used as a performance metric, lines […]

Trunk and Branch Management

June 1st, 2010

A real-world discussion about trunk and branch management that I found through reddit.com is reprinted here: From: Rasmus Lerdorf Subject: PHP 6 Groups: php.internals Date: Thu Mar 11 12:22:48 2010 Ah, Jani went a little crazy today in his typical style to force a decision. The real decision is not whether to have a version […]