Two parables about the YAGNI principle: both true stories.

Long time ago in a company far far away there was a piece of software. Every time we designed a new feature, we were told that “it must work when the computer is disconnected from the network”. Sometimes it did not matter, sometimes it complicated the design a lot. Punch line - no one ever ( Read more... )

Originally published at www.ikriv.com. Please leave any comments there.

I have been working with Git for about a year now, and I think I am ready for some summary. Before Git, I used SVN, and before it Perforce, TFS, and some other products, but I will use SVN as a prototypical “non-Git” system.

Git buys you flexibility and performance for the price ( Read more... )

In a nuthsell, SimpleXMl has two things broken:

1. Elements that represent “emtpy” tags evaluate to false. This is weird design.
2. Other elements sometimes evaluate to false due to bugs.

I covered problem #1 in the previous post. This post is about #2.

Unfortunately, due to bugs in the SimpleXML parser, a non-empty element may evaluate to false. ( Read more... )

The following code does not work as expected:

$xml = simplexml_load_string("text"); $node = $xml->xpath("/root/a")[0]; if ($node) process($node); // process($node) may not be called for some valid nodes

Unlike most other objects, SimpleXmlElement may evaluate as false even when it is not null. Specifically, SimpleXmlElements representing empty ( Read more... )

I run into the same story time and time again.

Someone stumbles upon a bug that they cannot explain. All plausible reasons are eliminated, but it still does not work. They call me for help.

When all plausible reasons are eliminated, what’s the next logical step? Start looking into less plausible reasons.

The amazing thing is, most people ( Read more... )

We just ran into a very funny story with UNICODE identifiers in C#.

It turned out that an identifier like ХTranfer was spelled with Russian letter Х (U+0425) instead of Latin X (U+0058). Furthermore, when we tried to build this code on the server, it complained that identifier ÕTransfer was not found. It turns out that some source files with the ( Read more... )