What you as a programmer SHOULD DO:

1. Give everything meaningful, searchable and pronounceable names.
2. Use names that other programmers can understand. Remember that the code is for programmers, not customers.
3. Functions should be small and smaller than that.
4. Functions should do one thing. They should do it well. They should do it only.
5. The ideal number of arguments for a function is zero. Max 3.
6. Prefer exceptions to returning error codes. Create informative error messages.
7. Prefer meaningful names to comments.
8. Write JavaDoc only for public API’s.
9. Format your code. While working in a team use a single formatting style.
10. Test your code with clean tests. Remember that test code is just as important as production code.
11. Test just one concept per test.
12. Test should follow the FIRST rule:

Fast -  tests should be fast.
Independent - tests should not depend on each other
Repeatable - tests should be repeatable in any environment
Self-validating – the test should have a boolean output
Timely - write unit tests before the production code.

What you as a programmer should AVOID:
1. Avoid encoding
2. Avoid duplicate code. Watch out not only duplicate functions but also duplicate functionality.
3. Avoid noisy, redundant, uninformative comments. Remember that one of the more common motivations for writing comments is bad code.

Related posts:

1. Ugly code: The Law of Demeter
2. Recipe for a high-quality “equals” method
3. Testing java with JUnit

Garmin nüvi 765T

I’ve had it out for a few testdrives here in Oslo. It had all the roads I were driving and it easily managed to calculate new routes when I turned right when I’ve should have gone straight forward or left.

The display is large and colorful, but the touchscreen is somewhat slow when I try to scroll the map or rotate the map. It’s 3D view of buildings is ok, but it isn’t exactly the latest FarCry2 engine. While driving you want to keep your eyes on the road, not on the 3D buildings, so it doesn’t really matter.

It has lots of Points of Interest (POI), though I’ve only checked some major ones. There are lots of restaurants, bars and gas stations on the map. Big plus for having both IKEAs in Oslo available as a POI!

The second time I were out driving wasn’t that cheerful. It’s live traffic alarm wasn’t spot on. In fact, it didn’t get anything right. One place it marked a whole section of the road as road work with a 2 minute delay, but there were none. It also guided me through the busy parts of the city with mostly red traffic lights at every intersection. As a “bonus”, as I might call it, it literally died upon me. Luckily I was familiar in the area so I managed to get home on my own. My wife tried to revive the GPS by holding the off button pressed for a long time. It didn’t respond. It displayed the map from where it froze. When I got home it finally could be revived by pressing the off button for 5 seconds. A big disappointment!

When I’m more familiar with this unit, I’ll post an updated review.

No related posts.