Venkat Subramaniam to the rescue

I have met Venkat Subramaniam for the first time on 33rd Degree conference. After his first presentation (by the way - it had fancy title "Pointy haired bosses and pragmatic programmers: Facts and Fallacies of Software Development") I was like "This guy has enormous knowledge and knows how to share it ! I must see his other presentations !". So I went to his two other presentations and guess what ? They were awesome as well !

Blocks in Ruby

One of the first things that a new Ruby programmer finds interesting in this language are blocks. On first sight they look a little bit weird. However after a first few uses they become as natural as breathing. Ruby blocks are very simple and in the same time very powerful mechanism. That's why I made up my mind to write a short article about them.

Code sandwich

Ruby koans is a great way to learn basics of Ruby. For me it was also a chance to meet for the first time a 'Code Sandwich' term. This is not a very popular term but I want to write about it. In my humble opinion it is a very common problem and a name 'code sandwich' fits just accurately. I'm going to show how we can solve it in Java and Ruby.

Humility lesson

As software developers we are dealing with bugs everyday. Through the years we have created many techniques that help us avoid them. TDD, pair programming, code review etc. Unfortunately none of them are perfect. 

Comments ? No, thank you...

Dear Programmers ! Please, do not write comments in your code. Seriously. I mean it. In most cases comments are totally useless so what is the point in writing them ?