If you’re new to software development, you might have heard someone talk about “smelly code” and wondered what it meant. After all, it’s not like code actually has a smell… and if it does, you probably need to clean your cooling...
If you’re just starting out with computer programming, you probably found this article by searching “how to use arrays” or something similar. Arrays appear in nearly every programming language, and they’re an essential data structure for organizing and manipulating pieces of...
In many modern programming languages, we don’t tend to spend a lot of time thinking about memory management (unless you’re my colleague Ben, who thinks that C++ is the pinnacle of software engineering and that none of us should have ever...
Have you ever heard the acronym “SOLID” used in reference to object-oriented programming? SOLID refers to a set of five principles for writing object-oriented software. The acronym comes to us from Robert “Uncle Bob” Martin, and acts as a guide for...
I’ve reviewed a lot of junior dev code… like, a lot. There are a handful of errors I see new programmers run into over and over again when creating OOP projects, so I wanted to write an article about them! In...
As a beginner, you may have heard other programmers talk about ‘boxing’ and ‘unboxing’ and wondered what was going on. Did someone get a gift? Are they moving houses? Turns out, boxing and unboxing are programming concepts that have to do...
How to declare a variable is often the first thing you learn in computer programming. After that, a lot of courses and instructors see fit to let you know computers can do math, and ask you to do things like, “declare...
When just starting out, I’ve had multiple students ask me how to ‘start’ a side project–but by ‘start’, they really mean ‘how do I organize my files’? Although modern IDEs and programming languages scaffold quite a bit of structure for new...
I’ve had a lot of students get hung up on getters and setters when they first start implementing object-oriented programming principles–especially in C#, because its auto-properties can feel a little too much like magic. In the simplest terms, getters and setters...
The concept of inheritance in object-oriented programming (OOP) allows us to derive classes from other classes–so a child class can “inherit” properties and methods from its parent class, like you may have inherited your eye color from your mom. Inheritance allows...
