Friday Links 0.0.8 - Unmaintainable Technical Debt

This is based on an email I send my .NET team at work

Happy Friday,

We’ve all worked in codebases (and probably created some) that are less than perfect. Sometimes we build things in a hurry, swearing that we’ll “circle back to this next sprint”. That of course, almost never happens.

Or maybe through ignorance of the underlying framework we set up an architecture that forces us to fight the framework or maintain thousands of lines of code duplicating features that were already included.

Sometimes we wonder if people do it on purpose…

Friday Links 0.0.5 - Unicode

This is based on an email I send my .NET team at work

Happy Friday,

Lets talk about Unicode. �

Unicode is just 16 bit characters instead of 8 right? Wrong. That depends on the encoding. Wait what.

Unicode is a deep topic, but I think its important to know the basics. The apps we build will have an increasingly global audience that depend on Unicode to be able to read and write their native languages on a computer.

Plus we want to make sure people’s emoji display correctly. 😎👍

Summary of Evidence Against I Sea App

Yesterday evening the twitter account SwiftOnSecurity began raising concerns that the I Sea App might be a fake.

The app claims to assign users random slices of the ocean to review and flag possible refugee boats that might need rescue.

The app had been getting a lot of international news attention, but something struck her as off and she asked for confirmation.

Not having anything better to do, I thought I might look into it.

Friday Links 0.0.2 - NodaTime

This is based on an email I send my .NET team at work

Happy Friday,

Just one this week but there’s multiple related articles at the bottom.

Jon Skeet: What’s Wrong with DateTime anyway?

http://blog.nodatime.org/2011/08/what-wrong-with-datetime-anyway.html

So if you’ve done much with building support for timezones, you know its confusing and tricky. A lot of that is because the built in System.DateTime struct is not expressive enough to capture all the intricacies of the way humans think about dates and time.

Friday Links 0.0.1

This is based on an email I send my .NET team at work

Happy Friday,

I come across a lot of interesting articles and stuff during the week and I wanted to pass some of it along. I’m going to try and keep doing this until people tell me its annoying.

I’ll generally have 2 or 3 links with brief commentary.