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Coding Horror

programming and human factors - Jeff Atwood

Compiled or Bust?March 19

While I may have mixed emotions toward LINQ to SQL, we've had great success with it on Stack Overflow. That's why I was surprised to read the following:

If you are building an ASP.NET web application that's going to get thousands of hits per hour, the execution overhead of Linq queries is going to consume too much CPU and make your site slow. There’s a runtime cost associated with each and every Linq Query you write. The queries are parsed and converted to a nice SQL Statement on

every hit. It’s not done at compile time because there’s no way to figure out what you might be sending as the parameters in the queries during runtime.

So, if you have common Linq to Sql statements like the following one ..

var query = from widget in dc.Widgets where widget.ID == id && widget.PageID == pageId select widget; var widget = query.SingleOrDefault();

.. throughout your growing web application, you are soon going to have scalability nightmares.

J.D. Conley goes further:

So I dug

The Non-Programming ProgrammerFebruary 22

I find it difficult to believe, but the reports keep pouring in via Twitter and email: many candidates who show up for programming job interviews can't program. At all. Consider this recent email from Mike Lin:

The article

Why Can't Programmers... Program? changed the way I did interviews. I used to lead off by building rapport. That proved to be too time-consuming when, as you mentioned, the vast majority of candidates were simply non-technical. So I started leading off with technical questions. First progressing from easy to hard questions. Then I noticed I identified the rejects faster if I went the other way – hard questions first – so long as the hard questions were still in the "if you don't know this then you can't work here" category. Most of my interviews still took about twenty minutes, because tough questions take some time to answer and evaluate. But it was a big improvement over the rapport-building method; and it could be done over the phone.

After reading your article, I started doing code interviews over the phone, using web meetings. My interview times were down to about 15 minutes each to identify people who just can't code— the vast majority.

I wrote that article in 2007, and I am stunned, but not entirely surprised, to hear that three years later "the vast majority" of so-called programmers w

Welcome Back CommentsFebruary 13

I apologize for the scarcity of updates lately. There have been two things in the way:

1. Continuing fallout from International Backup Awareness Day, which meant all updates to Coding Horror from that point onward were hand-edited text files. Which, believe me, isn't nearly as sexy as it … uh … doesn't sound.

2. I am presenting and conducting a workshop at Webstock 2010 in New Zealand. This is a two week trip I'm taking with the whole family, including our little buddy Rock Hard Awesome, so the preparations have been more intense than usual.

   On top of all that, according to the program, I just found that my presentation involves interpretive dance, too. Man. I wish someone had told me! My moves are so rusty, they've barely improved from Electric Boogaloo. But hey, at least I don't have to sing Andrews Sister songs like poor Brian Fling.

And then, of course, there's that crazy Stack Overflow thing I'm always yammering on a

Cultivate Teams, Not IdeasJanuary 25

How much is a good idea worth? According to Derek Sivers, not much:

It's so funny when I hear people being so protective of ideas. (People who want me to sign an NDA to tell me the simplest idea.) To me,

ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.

To make a business, you need to multiply the two. The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20. The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000. That's why I don't want to hear people's ideas. I'm not interested until I see their execution.

I was reminded of Mr. Sivers article when this email made the rounds earlier this month:

I feel that this story is important to tell you because Kickstarter.com copied us. I tried for 4 years to get people to take Fundable seriously, traveling across the country, even giving a presentation to FBFund, Facebook's fund to stimulate development of new apps. It was a series of rejections for 4 years. I really felt that I presented myself professionally in every business situation and I dressed appropriately and practiced my presentations. That was not enough. The idiots wanted us to show them charts with massive profits and widespread public acceptance so that they didn't

The Great Newline SchismJanuary 18

Have you ever opened a simple little ASCII text file to see it inexplicably displayed as onegiantunbrokenline?

Opening the file in a different, smarter text editor results in the file displayed properly in multiple paragraphs.

The answer to this puzzle lies in our old friend, invisible characters that we can't see but that are totally not out to get us. Well, except when they are.

The invisible problem characters in this case are newlines.

Did you ever wonder what was at the end of your lines? As a programmer, I knew there were end of line characters, but I honestly never thought much about them. They just … worked. But newlines aren't a universally accepted standard; they are different depending who you ask, and what platform they happen to be computing on:

DOS / WindowsCR LF\r\n0x0D 0x0AMac (early)CR\r0x0DUnixLF\n0x0A

The Carriage Return (CR) and Line Feed (LF) terms derive from manual typewriters, and old printers based on typewriter-like mechanisms