joshiatto - Developer IT

Don't Use "Static" in C#?

- by Joshiatto

I submitted an application I wrote to some other architects for code review. One of them almost immediately wrote me back and said "Don't use "static". You can't write automated tests with static classes and methods. "Static" is to be avoided." I checked and fully 1/4 of my classes are marked "static". I use static when I am not going to create an instance of a class because the class is a single global class used throughout the code. He went on to mention something involving mocking, IOC/DI techniques that can't be used with static code. He says it is unfortunate when 3rd party libraries are static because of their un-testability. Is this other architect correct? update: here is an example: APIManager - this class keeps dictionaries of 3rd party APIs I am calling along with the next allowed time. It enforces API usage limits that a lot of 3rd parties have in their terms of service. I use it anywhere I am calling a 3rd party service by calling Thread.Sleep(APIManager.GetWait("ProviderXYZ")); before making the call. Everything in here is thread safe and it works great with the TPL in C#.

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Don't Use Static? [closed]

- by Joshiatto

Possible Duplicate: Is static universally “evil” for unit testing and if so why does resharper recommend it? Heavy use of static methods in a Java EE web application? I submitted an application I wrote to some other architects for code review. One of them almost immediately wrote me back and said "Don't use "static". You can't write automated tests with static classes and methods. "Static" is to be avoided." I checked and fully 1/4 of my classes are marked "static". I use static when I am not going to create an instance of a class because the class is a single global class used throughout the code. He went on to mention something involving mocking, IOC/DI techniques that can't be used with static code. He says it is unfortunate when 3rd party libraries are static because of their un-testability. Is this other architect correct?

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How can a large company foster excellence in its engineers?

- by Joshiatto

I am tasked with improving the skills (quality & speed) of engineers in my company. Here are some ideas: Pair Programming TDD Automated Check-in Policies Talks given by experts Awards for coding excellence Encourage competition among engineers to contribute to GitHub Publish standards and practices docs on the intranet site "Gamification" of engineering. Somehow make becoming badasses into a game they will enjoy playing Training Showcase github checkins on screens around the office Add an "engineer of the month" to the intranet home page How can I drive traffic to the intranet home page? What crazy futuristic idea would drive engineers to go to the page every day to see who of their peers are making more money than them (inferred via recognition) and then go off and improve their skills and productivity to see their standings improve on the home page??? Or any ideas just to foster collaboration and love for their jobs so they start taking more pride in their work?? Don't take my ideas as symptomatic of our org. I take full responsibility for not knowing the right way to do this.

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Sign In With Facebook - Business Issues

- by Joshiatto

I've got an issue where this company wants to provide all sorts of whiz bang features to their users that require an insane number of facebook permissions for their FB app. Being that my name is going to be attached to this, I would rather give them a solution which allows for easy sign in and asks for the minimum permissions up front. This would give them a huge boost in registrations and activity publishing across the site with the potential to "go viral". If we ask for a ton of permissions up front I know for a fact we will not go viral and will probably incur much wrath from the blogosphere. What would you do?

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How best to merge/sort/page through tons of JSON arrays?

- by Joshiatto

Here's the scenario: Say you have millions of JSON documents stored as text files. Each JSON document is an array of "activity" objects, each of which contain a "created_datetime" attribute. What is the best way to merge/sort/filter/page through these activities via a web UI? For example, say we want to take a few thousand of the documents, merge them into a gigantic array, sort the array by the "created_datetime" attribute descending and then page through it 10 activities at a time. Also keep in mind that roughly 25% of these JSON documents are updated every day, and updates have to make it into the view within 5 minutes. My first thought is to parse all of the documents into an RDBMS table and then it would just be a simple query such as "select top 10 name, created_datetime from Activity where user_id=12345 order by created_datetime desc". Some have suggested I use NoSQL techniques such as hadoop or map/reduce instead. How exactly would this work? For more background, see: Why is NoSQL better for this scenario?

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How to convince the agile product owner to change their mind? [closed]

- by Joshiatto

A friend of a friend ran into a situation recently in which the agile product owner specified features down to exactly what every single user click should look like. The problem is, the dev team has already figured out a way to accomplish the business value in fewer clicks (better UX), but in the past, questioning the product owner has led to career disaster. How do we convince the product owner to change their mind and go along with our recommendation? What can be done within the agile model to fix this situation and how do we accomplish it? On a bigger level: What can be done to make agile product owners better at their job to prevent this kind of thing from happening?

Developer IT