Highest scored questions

2181 votes

1 answer

487k views

What things should a programmer implementing the technical details of a web application consider before making the site public? If Jeff Atwood can forget about HttpOnly cookies, sitemaps, and cross-...

1665 votes

11 answers

858k views

Which hashing algorithm is best for uniqueness and speed? Example (good) uses include hash dictionaries. I know there are things like SHA-256 and such, but these algorithms are designed to be secure,...

1352 votes

14 answers

278k views

I often talk to programmers who say "Don't put multiple return statements in the same method." When I ask them to tell me the reasons why, all I get is "The coding standard says so." or "It's ...

1050 votes

130 answers

438k views

I'm graduating with a Computer Science degree but I see websites like Stack Overflow and search engines like Google and don't know where I'd even begin to write something like that. During one summer ...

875 votes

357 answers

252k views

Looking back at my career and life as a programmer, there were plenty of different ways I improved my programming skills - reading code, writing code, reading books, listening to podcasts, watching ...

716 votes

29 answers

137k views

In one of the latest "WTF" moves, my boss decided that adding a "Person To Blame" field to our bug tracking template will increase accountability (although we already have a way of tying bugs to ...

713 votes

17 answers

251k views

We, as programmers, are constantly being asked 'How long will it take'? And you know, the situation is almost always like this: The requirements are unclear. Nobody has done an in depth analysis of ...

693 votes

9 answers

315k views

Why is 80 characters the "standard" limit for code width? Why 80 and not 79, 81 or 100? What is the origin of this particular value?

622 votes

13 answers

275k views

There has been a lot of discussion lately about the problems with using (and overusing) Singletons. I've been one of those people earlier in my career too. I can see what the problem is now, and yet, ...

585 votes

1 answer

76k views

I have recently seen a few URIs containing the query parameter "utf8=✓". My first impression (after thinking "mmm, looks cool") was that this could be used to detect a broken character encoding. So, ...

580 votes

2 answers

227k views

The Mars Curiosity rover has landed successfully, and one of the promo videos "7 minutes of terror" brags about there being 500,000 lines of code. It's a complicated problem, no doubt. But that is a ...

546 votes

6 answers

204k views

What are the main benefits of Facebook's React over the upcoming Web Components spec and vice versa (or perhaps a more apples-to-apples comparison would be to Google's Polymer library)? According to ...

544 votes

18 answers

496k views

In the comment to this great post, Roy Osherove mentioned the OAPT project that is designed to run each assert in a single test. The following is written on the project's home page: Proper unit tests ...

542 votes

31 answers

123k views

After watching National Geographic's MegaStructures series, I was surprised how fast large projects are completed. Once the preliminary work (design, specifications, etc.) is done on paper, the ...

470 votes

21 answers

28k views

This has been troubling me for some time, and I'd really appreciate the input of other professionals. Short background: I started programming when my parents bought me my first computer in 1988 (at ...