From Joel Spolsky's article on leaky abstractions: [C]ertain SQL queries are thousands of times slower than other logically equivalent queries. A famous example of this is that some SQL servers are dramatically faster if you specify "where a=b and b=c and a=c" than if you only specify "where a=b and b=c" even though the result set i...
I don't know if you read the recent post by Joel, but basically he says that you don't need unit testing for every unit or piece of code in your code base. "And that strikes me as being just a little bit too doctrinaire about something that you may not need. Like, the whole idea of agile programming is not to do things before you need t...
I was listening to the Stack Overflow Podcast #34 (59:00 - 1:02:00) and Joel mentioned the difficulty of pointers and recursion. He also mentioned thinking in two levels of abstraction. He also mentions these concepts in his Peril of JavaSchools article. .... But when you struggle with pointers, your program produces the line S...
I'm making some pretty string-manipulation-intensive code in C#.NET and got curious about some Joel Spolsky articles I remembered reading a while back: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000319.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html So, how does .NET do it? Two bytes per char? There ARE some Unicode chars^H...
I've just read Joel's "Three Management methods" http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/07.html but I'm really interested in some of the other ones he mentioned, including: The Jihad Method (I wish there was a less politically loaded name for it...) The Charismatic Cult Method and "Devil Wears Prada" method. I've definately live...
A long time ago Joel explained how various every-day coding things were slow, and this led to XML as a data store being slow: Back to Basics Are those every-day coding things - strcat and malloc - still slow in a std::string and dlmalloc world? What else has changed in modern processors and mainstream frameworks? And is XML still slow...
I am going to apply Joel's method: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000073.html I'm curious if is there anybody that used this method of hiring for long periods of time. Any comment could be useful. Thanks. ...