The Inquisitive Coder – Davy Brion's Blog

And there we go… the 300th post on this blog. I’m continuing the tradition, so here’s an overview of the 10 most popular posts in between the 200th and 299th post:

1. Tired Of Working With Big Visual Studio Solutions?

   This one was a bit of a fluke. It’s a solution (no pun intended) to a problem that i tried at work, and worked pretty well for us. When i wrote the post i considered it as ‘filler’ material but it turned out that quite a few people where happy with this.

2. Genesis: Bridging The Gap Between Requirements And Code

   This one was a shameless plug to one of the products that my company is working on. I actually thought that this would get more reactions from readers but unfortunately, it didn’t. It did get a lot of views so i guess that’s something.

3. What It Takes To Be A Great Technical Lead

   Just a list of the qualities/skills that a great technical lead needs to have IMO. And no, i don’t think i live up to that list in case you’re wondering

4. Why On Earth Would A Developer Do This?

   This was about a piece of code i saw in one of the books every developer supposedly has to read. That piece of code is really a shame, and considering where the code came from (not to mention who wrote it), it only makes matters worse.

5. Challenge: Do You Truly Understand This Code?

   I thought this one was a lot of fun. From the reactions i got, i guess most of you liked it too. I should do more of these in the future

6. Do Not Litter Your Code With Null Checks

   This was just me ranting against a practice that i’ve seen far too often.

7. Continuous Integration 101

   The basic rules to follow when you’re a member of a team that’s using Continuous Integration. I was tremendously frustrated with my coworkers when i wrote this post, and it shows. But it’s still a good list

8. Why Don’t We Learn?

   I’m generally pretty unhappy with the state of software development as an art, science, craft, field or whatever way you want to look at it. I guess this post explains why.

9. We All Write Bad Code

   We all try to write great, clean code but i think we should all be honest about the fact that we all have to write bad code once in a while. I still stand by my statement that anyone who claims he/she never writes bad code is either lying, ignorant or living in a fantasy world.

10. Performance Rules Of Thumb

    This is one of my personal favorites. Performance is an often recurring theme on this blog (though i usually avoid micro-optimizations since they’re usually pointless) and i just wanted to post a list of things to keep in my mind at all times when you’re writing code or designing something. Some people would consider those things premature optimizations but i have to disagree on that one. Most of this is just common sense and not following these rules is very likely to cause problems sooner or later in any real world project.

There you have it. The thing i found pretty interesting about this list is that it’s completely different from the previous lists at 100 and 200 posts. In those lists, most of the posts were about specific technical subjects (either certain libraries or approaches or solutions or whatever) whereas in the posts of this list, there’s not a lot of actual code to be found. I have no idea what i’m going to be writing about in the next 100 posts, though i’d guess it will be the same kind of mix between opinions and actual technical stuff. Suggestions (in general) are always welcome of course