Category Archives: Best Practice

Boxed primitives and ==

By Dave Copeland in Best Practice, Code, Culture | May 27, 2010

One part of programming culture at OPOWER is to program defensively, providing useful information when contracts are violated. What does this have to do with boxed primitives? Getting an assertion message of “Person 1001’s customer id 109032 didn’t match the passed-in customer’s id of 109032″ seemed logically impossible, but was somehow true. But first, let’s [...]

Tie Tuesday – more fun that it sounds

By Dave Copeland in Best Practice, Culture | January 19, 2010

The developers have an informal “Tie Tuesday” each work. It’s exactly what it sounds like. And, since you asked, yes, it is more fun to wear a tie when you don’t have to. Not everyone does it every week, but this week, we had the best participation yet: Riley Dawg participates in tie tuesday Continue reading ...

When is a null not a null?

By Tom Vaughan in Best Practice, Code | September 10, 2009

tl/dr: Don't have a non-null object's .toString() display "null". It's confusing and not helpful when looking at object states in IDE debuggers. I recently converted the attribute of our Person POJO that stored a user's email address from a java.lang.String to a javax.mail.InternetAddress. Call it not enough testing or lack of imagination, but I introduced a Null Pointer Exception in a back-office web flow where a new user is created for our customer service application. When a new CSR account is created and the email address is left blank, an NPE gets thrown up. Embarrassing, but easy to fix, right?

Move meetings to move developers

By Tom Vaughan in Best Practice, Development | August 28, 2009

Here's the scenario: You cruise in to the office at 8:45, get your coffee, check the reddits, and ignore that email from your parents asking if their computer picked up a virus because McAfee won't stop popping up a tooltray icon helpfully informing them that they're totally vulnerable. Right around 9:15, you get motivated to tackle that 2 point user story for the current iteration. You head over to the wiki, check out the specs for the requirement, find out what the Trac ticket number is and see if there are any comments with last minute advice or dependencies. None? Good. . . let's get started!

New Developer Law

By Tom Vaughan in Best Practice, Code, Development | August 26, 2009

NEW LAW FOR DEVELOPERS: If you throw an exception about some connection being refused, you'd better damn well put what connection you were attempting to make in the exception message. What inspired this law? Thanks for asking.

Subversion Branching “Good” Practice

By Jeff Kolesky in Best Practice, Code, Development | August 23, 2009

I am relatively new to Subversion — well, two years into using it now, but this is the first project I have used it on. Subversion, like any tool, has its quirks and works best when you really know how to use it. When I started, I treated the "trunk/branches/tags" directory structure exactly like a directory structure. It took me a little playing around until I stumbled on what I would call a best practice. When I checkout a new project, I do it like so: svn co http://domain.com/svnroot/project/trunk project That way, when I go to the project directory, I do not have to then go into the trunk directory to get to my files.