I have a philosophy on birthdays. The significant ones aren’t the numbers we usually choose- 18, 21, 40, whatever- it’s the ones where you need an extra bit. 2, 4, 8, and so on. By that standard, my next birthday landmark isn’t until 2044, and I’m a patient sort.

Christian inherited some legacy C# code which deals in birthdays. Specifically, it needs to be able to determine when your last birthday was. Now, you have to be a bit smarter than simply “lop off the year and insert this year,” since that could be a future birthday, but not that much smarter.

Testing for equality is hard. Equal references are certainly equal, but are equal values? What does it mean for two objects to “equal” each other? It’s especially hard in a language like JavaScript, which is “friendly” about type conversions.

In JavaScript land, you’re likely to favor a tool like “lodash”, which provides utility functions like isEqual.

It's a holiday in the US today, so we're reaching back into the archives while doing some quarantine grilling. This classic has a… special approach to handling enums. Original. --Remy

Ah yes, the enum. It's a convenient way to give an integer a discrete domain of values, without having to worry about constants. But you see, therein lies the problem. What happens if you don't want to use an integer? Perhaps you'd like to use a string? Or a datetime? Or a char?

If that were the case, some might say just make a class that acts similarly, or then you clearly don't want an enum. But others, such as Dan Holmes' colleague, go a different route. They make sure they can fit chars into enums.

If nulls are a “billion dollar mistake”, then optional/nullable values are the $50 of material from the hardware store that you use to cover up that mistake. It hasn’t really fixed anything, but if you’re handy, you can avoid worrying too much about null references.

D. Dam Wichers found some “interesting” Java code that leverages optionals, and combines them with the other newish Java feature that everyone loves to misuse: streams.

Josh was writing some code to interact with an image sensor. “Fortunately” for Josh, a co-worker had already written a nice large pile of utility methods in C to make this “easy”.

So, when Josh wanted to know if the sensor was oriented in landscape or portrait (or horizontal/vertical), there was a handy method to retrieve that information: