Published in Ingeniously Simple·Apr 29.NET benchmarking and profiling for beginnersThere comes a time, for most programs, when we need to make them faster. If you’re new to .NET, or have only tried profiling tools in older versions of .NET Framework, you might not be familiar with what tools are available for .NET Core / .NET 5. …Software Engineering7 min read
Published in Ingeniously Simple·Sep 16, 2021Typescript “casts” are not castsAt Redgate we recently ran an internal typescript training course, and I wanted to highlight a common misconception I saw a couple of times. To explain what I mean, let’s compare some similar-looking code in C# and typescript. In C#, we can use the as operator (sometimes called a “safe”…Typescript4 min read
Published in Ingeniously Simple·Apr 27, 2021How to teach things badlyToday’s idea isn’t directly technical, but by the end it should hopefully be clear how it can apply to programming and software development in general. Recently I’ve been caught up in watching chess videos on Youtube. …Chess3 min read
Published in Ingeniously Simple·Mar 9, 2021Efficient React editing with vim-surroundWhat makes learning vim worthwhile? While I’m far from a vim guru, and it often gets in the way, it speeds up editing code to the point where I think it’s definitely worthwhile. …React4 min read
Published in Ingeniously Simple·Jan 4, 2021Managing unmanaged objects in C#A couple of months ago, we ran into a tricky race condition with the way we were handling temporary files. …Software Development6 min read
Published in Ingeniously Simple·Jun 20, 2020Building a cli parser from scratchThere are plenty of CLI parser libraries out there for pretty much every programming language under the sun. However, sometimes you might not find one with the right combination of features you want, or maybe you just want to understand what makes them tick. …Software Engineering10 min read
Published in Ingeniously Simple·Mar 31, 2020Being deliberately meaninglessA quick one today: just a common thread between a bunch of different ideas. …in examples Metasyntactic variables (foo, bar, baz, etc) are an obvious example of being deliberately meaningless. …Software Development3 min read
Published in Ingeniously Simple·Feb 21, 2020Command/query objects and beyondFirst, a quick story: Recently I’ve been reworking a Redgate-internal chatbot I wrote a few years ago. It’s done pretty well over the years, but I wanted to take it off the random VM it was running on and make it cloud-hostable. The biggest change required was to rewrite the…Software Development5 min read
Published in Ingeniously Simple·Jan 16, 2020Building a virtualized list from scratchReact is pretty fast in general, but it can have trouble when repeatedly rendering thousands of elements. This is true even if only a few of the elements are visible at once! UI “virtualization” is a technique for emulating a list with many elements while only rendering as few as…Java Script5 min read
Published in Ingeniously Simple·Dec 24, 2019How to actually write good codeI’ve been writing code professionally for almost a decade now, and yet when people ask how to write code properly I don’t really have a good idea. This job is weird. A worrying amount of the time, I find myself relying on instinct or “experience” to try and figure out…Functional Programming7 min read
