TL;DR; – This is a no-content post, so feel free to ignore. And I am not drunk, this time.

I haven’t blogged since ages but I have been collating my to-be blogged thoughts in Evernote. Among all those collected items, this topic was the last sequentially but I thought it to be the first to be written down. I believe it is just a natural phenomena that during our younger days, our birthdays got us thinking about parties, the gifts we would get, the celebrations, cake, trumpets, elephants, giraffes (alright I am losing here…). A part of the natural phenomenon is also that once we are around our thirties, we do get some of the above thoughts, and one more with it… I got older by a year! I mean come on, its just a friggin birthday, every one has it. But somehow recently one word popped up in my mind which took me by a bit of a surprise. Retirement.

Hah… No way I am 33 there is shit load of time, so many years to go, so many new things waiting for me somewhere. But then I think, I have not seen a single retired software developer. I do not know where to find them. I am talking about someone who started as a computer science graduate and then pursued software engineering as a profession and has been with it all his/her life. Now dont bring in some big shot in our industry who is now donating all his money, I am talking about an average developer, got it? It might be a dumb thought because our industry is far too young compared to other disciplines like architecture, medicine etc. Somehow I am able to imagine my parents retiring in their profession which is one of those matured ones, but not myself. This thing comes in my mind because for sure I do not want to see myself on stack overflow searching for an efficient way to find duplicate letters in a string in C language. That’s right, I started with C#, then did some Java, now doing Javascript, next I have a feeling its going to be C++, and if I do not get a good hold of myself then around 40 Ill be reading Kerninghan & Ritchie while my kids play super mario on my laptop (yes there will be super mario then). Seriously I am not drunk today. Some out there have retired at my age (go Google them), if I do such a thing my family would abandon me, which is cool in a way .

On a serious note, what should a developer do when such thoughts start creeping his/her mind. Surely I am not worried about something that is not an issue at all. I think if we are unable to see ourselves something may be 5-10 years down the line then it is like rowing your boat without knowing where you want to go. Its fun for now, but later time will catch up with you. I am afraid to say I am rowing my boat pretty hard, learning cool new hip hop things which will get pretty old tomorrow (especially in javascript), but I do not know where I should be heading. I do not want to be coding at 40, period. But then what, move into management is one of the obvious thoughts. Meh…, may be not. There are so many monkey managers around me I hardly want to see myself as one of them. But hey dont remind me of this blog post if you see me as a manager somewhere! Doing something out of the box and something completely unrelated to software is a thought I think every software guy/gal holds somewhere in a tiny corner of their brains. I have made many friends in different countries, some want to start a dairy farm, some want to start a restaurant (I do), some want to live in a van down by the river…These are things that we developers feel are not as hard as writing code, but I know they will be much tougher to even start, maintaining it is a different game all together.

So this is where I am, I am 33 doing good coding, liked by many, hated by some (mostly wife) and thinking what the fuck I should be doing before I turn 34. I think I will be coding, what do you think!

Happy Programming!

TL;DR; = This post is about improving the way you write deep null checks in C#, i.e. a chain of If-not-null checks along the object hierarchy.

I am sure there have been times in your developer life when you saw something like this, 

class Person
{
    public Address Address { get; set; }
}

public class Address
{
    public State State { get; set; }
}

public class State
{
    public int PinCode { get; set; }
}
...
...
var p = new Person();
...
...

if (p.Address != null && p.Address.State != null)
{
   var pin = p.Address.State.PinCode;
}

Ugh.., yes you have… The point is you have to go through a lot of checks in between to reach the PinCode field. In this example there are just 2 checks for Address and State, but there could be more complicated scenarios. While talking about this, I do understand by the Law of Demeter we should not be having such deep checks in the first place. But for this blog post sake, consider this as some hairy legacy code. Moving on, there is a way you could do the same thing but in a much more readable way. What I want to do is in case of a null instance anywhere in the chain of objects, the final value should be a default decided by me, without any null reference error. Here is my attempt,

public static class Extension
{
public static TResult With<TSource,TResult>(this TSource source, Func<TSource,TResult> evaluator, TResult failureValue)
    where TSource : class
    where TResult : class
{
    if (evaluator == null)
        throw new InvalidOperationException("Boom!!!");
    var res = source != null ? evaluator(source) : failureValue;
    return res ?? failureValue;
}
}

public class Person
{
    public Address Address { get; set; }
    public static Person NullInstance
    {
        get
        {
            return new Person() { Address = Address.NullInstance };
        }
    }
}

public class Address
{
    public State State { get; set; }
    public static Address NullInstance
    {
        get { return new Address() { State = State.NullInstance }; }
    }

}

public class State
{
    public int PinCode { get; set; }
    public static State NullInstance
    {
        get
        {
            return new State() { PinCode = -1 };
        }
    }
}

...
...

var pin =  this.With(x => p, Person.NullInstance)
               .With(x => x.Address, Address.NullInstance)
               .With(x => x.State, State.NullInstance).PinCode;

Definitely more readable huh.

Ok so I might be a little late to the party, but nonetheless I am in the party now. Since I do follow many blogs and in search of new interesting blogs all the time, I always have this situation wherein I do find something really intriguing to read but have to save it for later. The things that interest me are coding blogs for Java, C#, Scala (I mentioned them in the increasing order of coolness), lifehacker like blogs, Agile, Daily WTF of course and the list goes on. I needed something that I can use on any of my devices, iPhone, iPad, Mac, my Dell laptop. I needed something that could do the job in at the most one click. That is the best you could do really (cant think of any quicker way really). I did hear quite a bit about EverNote and it is an excellent tool. Although somehow it is not like a one click solution I was looking for.

And then this Pocket shows up. The first thing I looked was the list of devices supported, satisfied there. The second thing was how it is used. It really has a one click solution if you are already using a supported feed reader. I use Feedly (which is an excellent replacement for Google Reader). So all you do is while you have your blog post open, just click the “Pocket” icon button at the top, thats it. End of Story! May be not. I use Chrome as my browser for reading blogs when I am on a laptop or desktop. Its got a Chrome plugin that behaves pretty much the same One-Click way I just mentioned. If this explanation was too complicated for you, they even have a short video on how to use it, go check it out. This is really End of Story.

Happy Pocketing!

My professional career until now (spans barely 8 years), has been mostly “C#”ish. I liked the language when I started working with it, and really enjoyed staying within the Visual Studio editor. While I was working earlier in my career, I did find interest in reading several blogs about being a better programmer as a whole. The word “polyglot” reverberated in many such well thought blogs. I did understand at the point that having exposure to many languages will equip me better in my work. But here is my honest take on it now that I have spent some reasonably sizable amount of time with a language.

You got to know a particular language well first. For me it is undoubtedly C# as it stands. Once you have that under your sleeves, when you start exploring other languages you learn them in a different way than you would have learnt if you had not mastered a language. It becomes just involuntary that you start comparing features of this new language to the language of your forte. And with this the benefits are two-fold, you learn the new language faster, and you find better ways of solving problems in your mastered language. I think the second point is really exciting for me as I venture on learning new languages and paradigms. For some limited time now, I have worked on Java professionally. I have taken a stab at Scala and Haskell during my personal time although it is not usual to find these 2 languages easily in mainstream application development. The best way to learn languages is to solve some really common problems in computer science. I like the Producer-Consumer problem as it highlights usages of collections and threads which form the biggest chunk of the stuff we use. Below are C# snippet juxtaposed to Java snippet. Spot 6 differences to win a free trip to Goa .

public class PCQueueCharp
{
    private Queue queue = new Queue();
    private static readonly object SyncLock = new object();

    public PCQueue(int capacity)
    {
        Capacity = capacity;
    }

    public int Capacity { get; private set; }

    public void AddTask(ITask task)
    {
        lock(SyncLock)
        {
            if (queue.Count == Capacity)
                Monitor.Wait(SyncLock);
            queue.Enqueue(task);
            Monitor.Pulse(SyncLock);
        }
    }

    public ITask RemoveTask()
    {
        lock(SyncLock)
        {
            if (queue.Count == 0)
                Monitor.Wait(SyncLock);
            var task = queue.Dequeue();
            Monitor.Pulse(SyncLock);
            return task;
        }
    }
}

public class PCQueueJava
{
    private int capacity;
    private final Queue queue;
    private static final Object SyncLock = new Object();

    public PCQueue(int capacity)
    {
        this.capacity = capacity;
        queue = new ArrayDeque(capacity);
    }

    public void AddTask(ITask task) throws InterruptedException
    {
        synchronized (SyncLock)
        {
            if(queue.size() == capacity)
                SyncLock.wait();

            queue.add(task);
            SyncLock.notify();
        }
    }
    public ITask RemoveTask() throws InterruptedException
    {
        synchronized (SyncLock)
        {
            if(queue.size() == 0)
                SyncLock.wait();
            ITask task = queue.remove();
            SyncLock.notify();
            return task;
        }
    }
}

And here is a beginners implementation in Scala

class PCQueue(capacity:Int)
{
  val queue = new mutable.Queue[ITask]()
  val syncObject = new AnyRef

  def addTask(task : ITask) : Unit =
  {
    synchronized
    {
      if(queue.length == capacity)
        wait()

      queue += task
      notify()
    }
  }

  def removeTask() : ITask =
  {
    var task : ITask = null
    synchronized
    {
      if(queue.length == 0)
        wait()

    task = queue.dequeue()
    notify()
    }
    return task
  }
}