If We Want to Go Fast, We Need to Go Well

Have you ever thought that we won't need to code anymore because programs might be generated from specification? The answer can be yes or no; there is still arguing about it.

The programming language is more and more closed to the requirements. The starting is from a very low level as Assembly to a very high level like Python. However, it doesn't make much sense when saying that we will eliminate coding. For me, we currently still need to express our ideas in exact words that tells the machine what we want. Otherwise, I hope in the future the machine is intelligent enough to understand our requirements directly from our words. ;)

Take a look at the famous quote of Robert C.Martin about what I mentioned above:

"Remember that code is really the language in which we ultimately express the requirements. We may create languages that are closer to the requirements. We may create tools that help us parse and assemble those requirements into formal structures. But we will never eliminate necessary precision—so there will always be code."

So there will always be code and we should take care our code - this is all what I want to point out.

Later equals never, it is somehow a fact of refactoring code. I am quite sure that many of us might meet the following situation. At the beginning of building a project, we are just focusing on making a working software and then more and more features are added but we don't care about cleaning up code. It seems we go quite fast until we can not move anymore because the mess is out of our control. And then, we are rolled into a loop; that is: team produtivity is slowed down> increase new team members > increase mess > team productivity is slowed down > ...

Reasons for bad code is because of requirements changes, because of the schedule is too tight and because of bla bla bla. No, don't blame! Just because of unprofessional programmers. So, will we re-design/re-build the system in this case? No, it is too late. It costs too much time and humans to do this. Therefore, the only way to go fast is to keep the code as clean as possible at all times.

Yeah, that is it for my topic. I just want to share briefly my review from the beginning part of the book Clean Code. Check further parts in my next reviews.

Let me know what your ideas down below.

Reference:
[1]. Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

Comments

Creating a Chatbot with RiveScript in Java

Motivation "Artificial Intelligence (AI) is considered a major innovation that could disrupt many things. Some people even compare it to the Internet. A large investor firm predicted that some AI startups could become the next Apple, Google or Amazon within five years" - Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University. Using chatbots to support our daily tasks is super useful and interesting. In fact, "Jenkins CI, Jira Cloud, and Bitbucket" have been becoming must-have apps in Slack of my team these days. There are some existing approaches for chatbots including pattern matching, algorithms, and neutral networks. RiveScript is a scripting language using "pattern matching" as a simple and powerful approach for building up a Chabot. Architecture Actually, it was flexible to choose a programming language for the used Rivescript interpreter like Java, Go, Javascript, Python, and Perl. I went with Java. Used Technologies and Tools Oracle JDK 1.8...

Styling Sort Icons Using Font Awesome for Primefaces' Data Table

So far, Primefaces has used image sprites for displaying the sort icons. This leads to a problem if we want to make a different style for these icons; for example, I would make the icon "arrow up" more blurry at the first time the table loading because I want to highlight the icon "arrow down". I found a way that I can replace these icons with Font Awesome icons. We will use "CSS Pseudo-classes" to achieve it. The hardest thing here is that we should handle displaying icons in different cases. There is a case both "arrow up" and "arrow down" showing and other case is only one of these icons is shown. .ui-sortable-column-icon.ui-icon.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s { background-image: none; margin-left: 5px; font-size: 1.1666em; position: relative; } .ui-sortable-column-icon.ui-icon.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s:not(.ui-icon-triangle-1-s)::before { content: "\f106"; font-family: "FontAwesome"; position: ...

Functional programming in Java 8

In my previous post , we discussed about why we should consider to use functional programming. Now, let's delve into what functional programming in Java is. What is pure functional programming? Shortly, f unctional programming is programming using functions. A function corresponds to a mathematical function such as log, sin. Basically, it takes zero or more arguments, give one or more result, and has no side effects. We can't completely program in pure functional style in Java Why? For example, calling Scanner.nextLine twice typically gives different result. So, it's just called "functional-style programming". How is that? - There is no mutating structures visible to callers. That means your side effect may not be visible to a program, but it's visible to the programmer in terms of slower execution. - A function or method shouldn't throw any exceptions (follows the concept "pass arguments, return result"). We can use types like Opti...

AI for Everyone

You might have heard of a lot about AI, Machine learning, Data science, Deep learning, etc,... But, what exactly these terms mean and how is the connection between those. Here is my understanding: There are two ideas of AI: - ANI (Artificial Narrow Intelligence): E.g., smart speaker, self-driving car and web search. - AGN (Artificial General Intelligence): do anything a human can do. ANI is realistic and incredibly valuable. Though AGN is still too far away, and there is no need to unduly worry about it. When talking about data in term of AI that means talking about dataset . There are several methods to get a dataset: - Manual labeling - Observing user behaviors - Observing behaviors of other things such as machine - Downloading dataset from a website or acquiring it from a partner. Machine learning (ML) is a tool in AI. Supervised learning is a type of ML that learns A to B, or input to output mappings. Deep learning/Neural networks is...

Sharing a virtualenv across several Python projects using Pipenv

There is a standard library for all projects in Python. However, several projects don’t always have the same dependencies all the time. That is where virtual environments come to play. You can follow this official document to use two separated tools virtualenv and pip to fulfill that need. My preferred alternative is to use pipenv . Pipenv is easy to use and convenient. The following are my steps to make a shared virtualenv for my all projects which requires the same dependencies. Step 1. Create an isolated virtualenv. python -m venv my-shared-env Step 2. Create a symbolic link to the created virtualenv. cd project_1 ln -s ~/.local/share/virtualenvs/my-shared-env .venv I have encountered the following issue at step 1. FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '{my_project_path}/.venv/bin/pip': '{my_project_path}/.venv/bin/pip' The root cause was I tried to create virtualenv by running pipenv install and renaming the generated virtualenv to ...

vhandit

Search This Blog