The view outside my apartment: I’m thankful for it every time I see it.  While I enjoy crafting software, I can only dream of creating something as beautiful as what is outside my window.

Character encodings are a necessary evil for programmers.  It something that I wish I could forget, but to be competent I need to know about them. I’ve read Tim Bray’s writings on the subject.  I’ve read Joel’s writings on the subject. And it still bit me in perhaps the simplest form possible, when I wasn’t [...]

Pervasive null tests are a code smell. – Avdi Grimm I agree. If you’re often checking for null, then you don’t trust your code.  Why don’t you trust it?  Instead of checking for null, why don’t you fix the failure point that is causing the null? Null checks violate the fail fast, fail often principle.  [...]