Classic hits

Jacob Nielsen has a list of Top Ten Blog Design Mistakes. Number 5 is “Classic hits are buried” where he suggests that it is useful for readers if you list your most ‘important’ entries prominently as well as regularly back linking to earlier posts. This sounds like sensible stuff; until you have to work out what your classic entries are from the other 486 not so classic postings…

Anyway, I’ve had a go at starting a list of some entries that are either a) very popular or b) clearly define my views on software development. The list is available in the archive section of the navigation bar on the front page and it’s repeated here so that I can waffle on a little about each of the entries that I’ve chosen and, more importantly, give you, the reader, somewhere to suggest the addition or removal of entries.

Classic entries

• [0] - the first entry

• 80 00 1A 00 0F D7 - Bluetooth and OBEX. Lots of comments about how to get various bluetooth devices working with XP.

• Army of muppets - less is more, lots of programmers are crap, don’t stuff your team full of them…

• Assert is evil, except… - my, apparantly controversial, views on the use and misuse of the humble assert.

• Async OpenSSL - integrating OpenSSL with asynchronous sockets.

• Bluetooth Sockets on XP - a simple snippet of code that is currently my most popular posting to date.

• Classic hits - this entry…

• COM is just an interface layer - why you should usually treat COM objects just like any other external system.

• Comment rot - why most comments should be removed.

• CORBA, C++ and Java - a series of articles on CORBA object lifetime management.

• Deadlock detection on Win32 - finding deadlocks, automatically, before they happen.

• Death by debug trace - just like asserts, “debug traces” are often misused.

• Exceptional - why exceptions are not evil.

• Flame on, ooops! - live and learn, some people don’t like to be disagreed with…

• Latest Socket Server code - the latest free version of my server framework.

• OLE DB and ADO - a series of articles on OLE DB. Just say no.

• Practical Testing - a series of articles that shows how to test a gnarly piece of non-trivial, real world, code from my “back catalogue”.

• Refactoring Project, reprise - an entry that summarises what we achieved on the “Refactoring project” a Trade Entry and FX display system based on the “big ball of mud” design pattern.

• Singletons are evil - they inhibit testing, are often simply disguised globals and are used way too often; those GOF guys have a lot to answer for.

• Sri Lanka, my sister and the tsunami - my sister was in Sri Lanka on 26th December 2004, this is her story.

• Why do you code? - because I couldn’t not code.

• Why so much bad code? - thinking, discipline, courage; much code is written without any of these.

Disagree with me? Leave a comment and we’ll talk about it.

Thanks to Jeff Atwood for the link to Jacob Nielsen’s piece.

Note that the Classic Entries link that’s available from the navigation menu below the site logo above contains an updated version of this list.