Things I Learnt The Hard Way - The Magical Number Seven, Plus Or Minus Two

"The magical number" is a psychology article about the number of things one can keep in their mind at the same time.

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Things I Learnt The Hard Way - Understand And Stay Away From Cargo Cult

"Cargo cult" is a type of cult which appeared in the Melanesia, in which the natives would build their copy of an airplane (no motor, 'cause they didn't have the knowledge to build one -- or even knew what went inside the airplane) in the hopes they would get the same results as a real airplane.

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Things I Learnt The Hard Way - Don't Mess With Things Outside Your Project

Simple rule: Is the code yours or from your team? Good, you can make any changes you want. Does it come from outside? DON'T. TOUCH. IT.

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Things I Learnt The Hard Way - Design Patters Are Used to Name Solution, Not Find Them

Most of the times I saw design patterns being applied, they were applied as a way to find a solution, so you end up twisting a solution -- and, sometimes, the problem it self -- to fit the pattern.

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Things I Learnt The Hard Way - "Right Tool For The Job" Is Just To Push An Agenda

A lot of times I heard "We should use the right tool for the job!" Most of those times it was just a way to push an agenda.

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Things I Learnt The Hard Way - The Right Tool Is More Obvious Than You Think

Maybe you're in a project that needs to process some text. Maybe you're tempted to say "Let's use Perl" 'cause you know that Perl is very strong in processing text.

But that may still be not the right tool.

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Things I Learnt The Hard Way - If Your Data Has a Schema, Use a Structure

You may be tempted to use a list (or tuple, if your language allows) to keep your data if it has, say, only 2 fields. Don't.

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Things I Learnt The Hard Way - It's Better To Let The Application Crash Than Do Nothing

Although that sounds weird, it's better to not add any error handling than silently capturing errors and doing nothing.

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Things I Learnt The Hard Way - Types Say What You Data Is

Memory is just a sequence of bytes; bytes are just numbers from 0 to 255; what those numbers mean is described on the language type system.

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Things I Learnt The Hard Way - If You Know How To Handle It, Handle It

If you know an error can occur, then you should handle it properly, instead of ignoring it.

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