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Smashes, SMASHES! into that poor little car. :( Alternative title could have been: Driver weaves around car sitting in the left turn lane, ignores the red light, tries to turn left from center lane, ignores train signal, inevitable happens.

A common problem I see in object-oriented design is: A wizard is a kind of player. A warrior is a kind of player. A staff is a kind of weapon. A sword is a kind of weapon. A player has … Continue reading →

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In this series we’re exploring the problem “a player can use a weapon, a wizard is a kind of player, a staff is a kind of weapon, but a wizard can only use a staff”. The best solution we’ve come … Continue reading →

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So let’s digress for a few episodes here. We’ll temporarily leave aside the problem of how we can have both a Player that has a Weapon and a Wizard that has a Staff. (Or Dagger.) Supposing that we can figure … Continue reading →

There are many, many questions on Stack Overflow about both parsing and formatting date/time values. (I use the term “date/time” to mean pretty much “any type of chronlogical information” – dates, times of day, instants in time etc.) Given how often the same kinds of mistakes are made, I thought it would be handy to … Continue reading Common mistakes in date/time formatting and parsing →

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Last time we saw that in order to decide what code to call based on the runtime type of one argument — single dispatch — we could use virtual dispatch. And we saw that we could use the inaptly-named Visitor … Continue reading →

Emerald Express (EmX) is a popular and growing BRT system in Eugene OR.

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Finalizers are interesting and dangerous because they are an environment in which everything you know is wrong. I’ve written a lot about the perils of C# finalizers / destructors (either name is fine) over the years, but it’s scattered in … Continue reading →

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Now that we’ve looked at a bunch of myths about when finalizers are required to run, let’s consider when they are required to not run: Myth: Keeping a reference to an object in a variable prevents the finalizer from running … Continue reading →

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I briefly discussed copy-paste errors in code earlier; though this is a rich area of defects that I will probably at some point go into more detail on, that’s not for today. Though this is a trivial little issue, I … Continue reading →

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As a reminder, we invite you to join us for our next STB Meetup TONIGHT from 5:30-7:30pm at the Impact Hub in Pioneer Square. Metro planners Ted Day and Jeremy Fichter will join us to discuss the U-Link restructure, with a brief presentation beginning at 5:30 and plenty of time for open Q&A thereafter. At roughly […]

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The Cambridge Guided Busway is the world’s longest with 16 miles of guided sections. The guidance allows buses to run on a very narrow right of way (typical of many former railroad lines). It’s greener due to the vegetation that grows between the grooved concrete slabs which contain the wheels of the bus. Running the buses on […]

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At the moment, I’m spending a fair amount of time thinking about a new version of the C# API and codegen for Protocol Buffers, as well as other APIs for interacting with Google services. While that’s the context for this post, I want to make it very clear that this is still a personal post, … Continue reading Backwards compatibility is (still) hard →

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Last time on FAIC I reran my 2004 article on tips for coding on whiteboards for interviews. This time, a rerun from 2009 article on a similar topic. Next time, some more thoughts on this subject. Interviewing job-seeking candidates is … Continue reading →

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Seattlish writes up WSDOT’s new video explaining how to use the “crazy confusing” I-405 Express Toll Lanes. Sound Transit has launched SoundTransit3.org, with a web survey, list of public meetings, background documents, and maps so generic no constituency could possibly mistake them for a promise of service. Please take the survey. PLU’s magazine Resolute has a great profile […]

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Good overview of Honolulu’s rail transit project, which will be the longest driverless transit system in the US. Honolulu is already one of the most transit intensive cities in the US, ranking sixth, just below Boston, in terms of annual per capita ridership (88.4 in 2012).

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A quick note: I’m going to be traveling for much of the rest of June and I haven’t got articles queued up, so the blog will go dark for a bit; see you in July! In the last two episodes … Continue reading →