We’ve talked about Java’s streams in the past. It’s hardly a “new” feature at this point, but its blend of “being really useful” and “based on functional programming techniques” and “different than other APIs” means that we still have developers struggling to figure out how to use it.

Jeff H has a co-worker, Clarence, who is very “anti-stream”. “It creates too many copies of our objects, so it’s terrible for memory, and it’s so much slower. Don’t use streams unless you absolutely have to!” So in many a code review, Jeff submits some very simple, easy to read, and fast-performing bit of stream code, and Clarence objects. “It’s slow. It wastes memory.”

Jessica has worked with some cunning developers in the past. To help cope with some of that “cunning”, they’ve recently gone out searching for new developers.

Now, there were some problems with their job description and salary offer, specifically, they were asking for developers who do too much and get paid too little. Which is how Jessica started working with Blair. Jessica was hoping to staff up her team with some mid-level or junior developers with a background in web development. Instead, she got Blair, a 13+ year veteran who had just started doing web development in the past six months.

There are many ways to mess up doing unique identifiers. It's a hard problem, and that's why we've sorta agreed on a few distinct ways to do it. First, we can just autonumber. Easy, but it doesn't always scale that well, especially in distributed systems. Second, we can use something like UUIDs: mix a few bits of real data in with a big pile of random data, and you can create a unique ID. Finally, there are some hashing-related options, where the data itself generates its ID.

Tiffanie was digging into some weird crashes in a database application, and discovered that their MODULES table couldn't decide which was correct, and opted for two: MODULE_ID, an autonumbered field, and MODULE_UUID, which one would assume, held a UUID. There were also the requsite MODULE_NAME and similar fields. A quick scan of the table looked like:

Submitter “NotAThingThatHappens” stumbled across a “unique” way to check for nulls in C#.

Now, there are already a few perfectly good ways to check for nulls. variable is null, for example, or use nullable types specifically. But “NotAThingThatHappens” found approach:

“Comments are important,” is one of those good rules that often gets misapplied. No one wants to see a method called addOneToSet and a comment that tells us Adds one item to the set.

Still, a lot of our IDEs and other tooling encourage these kinds of comments. You drop a /// or /* before a method or member, and you get an autostubbed out comment that gives you a passable, if useless, comment.

Andrea writes to confess some sins, though I'm not sure who the real sinner is. To understand the sins, we have to talk a little bit about C/C++ macros.

Andrea was working on some software to control a dot-matrix display from an embedded device. Send an array of bytes to it, and the correct bits on the display light up. Now, if you're building something like this, you want an easy way to "remember" the proper sequences. So you might want to do something like: