As 2008 is coming to an end, it's time to do some reflection. This blog has been active for 14 months, there are good pieces, normal pieces and the no-so-popular pieces. But in times such as this, it's good if I can just recap the the popular ones and forget the not so popular ones.
Here are the most popular posts, in ascending order, as measured by Google Analytics .
- Why Shout? Can't We just Talk?
- Unit Testing, What a Pain!
- How to not Read New Code
- Programming is All About Passion
- Stop the Installation Process in order to Install Successfully
- The One Single Tip to Comment Your Code
- Why Every Good Developer Needs to Know How to Mock
- Why IT Managers are Hiring Based on Experience
- Writing Maintainable Code Considered Harmful.
- Why Good Developers are Not Getting 10 Times the Pay
You see, a lot of people ( especially the ones at Reddit ) like to laugh off at people who make mistakes. OK, I agree that correction is needed, mistakes need to be pointed out. But why need to add insults on top of all that?
This is a response to Phil Haacks Tell Me your Unit Testing Pain post. It talks about the obstacles I faced in creating unit tests
Some advices on how to read other people's code. A short post. I didn't expect it to draw in that many traffic.
Passion! Without passion it's not possible to keep up with changes. Without passion it's very hard not to be rendered obsolete by the change of technologies. Without passion... well, you get the idea. Without passion one can't be a programmer for long.
A WTF I encountered when I tried to install VS 2008 SP1 beta on my machine.
We are told that code comment is a good thing. The more comments there are, the better. But comments are often ineffective. Your code is the most effective, comprehensive, relevant kind of comment.
If you are doing TDD , or if you are writing tests, sooner or later you will need to know how to mock out dependencies, isolating concerns for testing purpose.
Everyone talks about how to hire great developers . No one seems to think that experience, or particular skills in a niche area is an important factor. But when comes to the real thing, managers seem to base their assessment on experience and skills set rather than other factors. This post tells you why.
We are told to write readable code, maintainable code, but sometimes it's better to act in contrary to this advice.... A follow-up post appears here, but it's not as popular as the first one.
I know, and so does everyone, good developers are a lot more productive than the bad ones, but this ability gap is never really reflected in the salary range ( A contradiction of Efficient Market Hypothesis ?). This is the most popular post of the year.
Now, a little bit about Top Content vs. Time, I'll let the below image does the talking:
As one can see, the traffics were not smoothen out throughout the year. To borrow a phrase from finance, the traffic was volatile.It seems most traffic came from a few special days when I received a spike of visitors. Those were the days when my posts made it to the front page of Reddit or Hacker News . I also drew quite a portion of traffic from dotnetkicks and dzone. On normal days when my posts were not on anywhere, the traffic was low, an indication of the fact that search engines didn't draw too much traffic here.
So, that's it for 2008. Hopefully 2009 I can come out with more quality posts to keep everyone entertained!
