When you work in a team it is of great importance that you all follow the same rules. Otherwise your turn a code base in a mess in no time. We settled for StyleCop because it allowed us to delegate the nitpicking of code formatting and code style to a tool that does it automatically …
Earlier this year I read the book The Mikado Method by Ola Ellnestam and Daniel Brolund. Whenever someone describes their process as a “pragmatic, straightforward, and empirical method to plan and perform non-trivial technical improvements on an existing software system” I get sceptical. Too many books claim that and deliver nothing. But this process is …
View functions are the main part of a Flask application. If we keep adding them to the same file, we quickly will be unable to maintain our application. Luckily for us, Flask comes with a solution to that problem called Blueprint. This post is part of my journey to learn Python. You can find the …
We use StyleCopAnalyzers (the successor of the StyleCop package) to get consistent code in all our projects. While it is sometimes annoying, it is the simplest way we found to enforce code style guidelines. Since we use it in all our projects, we want to reuse our customised ruleset. StyleCopAnalyzers allows you influence the rules …
One of the most important concepts of object-oriented design is encapsulation. You try to hide all the internal things of a class from the other developers and only offer them a subset of functionality to use. You can achieve this by setting an appropriate access modifier for your methods and classes: public: The type or …
The world keeps turning and when you do not actively spend time to update the dependencies of your projects, you will fall behind. First one minor version, then another and before you know, there are a few new major versions released and your project is full of security risks. We all know that his happens …
Our latest upgrade of SonarQube took far more time than expected. I did a few upgrades in the last two years, but none was such a challenge. Everything that can go wrong has gone wrong, and without my prior experience, I may have given up. Let me point out the obstacles you may encounter and …
When we refactor our code, we want to make it better. Not just a tiny bit better, a lot better. Therefore, we look at refactorings that change our code in big steps, like extract method or extract class. However, tiny little risk-free steps can bring us to insights that we miss otherwise. Sliding lines of …
We can use many attributes to describe a good application: changeable, future-proof, well designed, or flexible are just a few of them. What does this mean? Is this just a challenge for the most uncommon word pair? Or is there something behind those words that we can measure? My work gave me a good example …
Not every design decision for your database will pass the test of time. Better names pop up or sometimes you just created a table in the wrong place. You could throw everything away and start from scratch, but a much better approach is just to fix what is wrong. If you want to move a …