February 2010
Beginner
255 pages
6h 10m
English
Content preview from 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 25. Don’t Be Cute with Your Test Data
| It was getting late. I was throwing in some placeholder data to test the page layout I’d been working on. |
| I appropriated the members of The Clash for the names of users. Company names? Song titles by the Sex Pistols would do. Now I needed some stock ticker symbols—just some four-letter words in capital letters. |
| I used those four-letter words. |
| It seemed harmless. Just something to amuse myself, and maybe the other developers the next day before I wired up the real data source. |
| The following morning, a project manager took some screenshots for a presentation. |
PROGRAMMING HISTORY is littered with these kinds of war stories. Things that developers and designers did “that no one else would see,” which unexpectedly became visible.
The leak type can vary but, when it happens, it can be deadly to the person, team, or company responsible. Examples include:
During a status meeting, a client clicks on a button that is as yet unimplemented. He is told, "Don’t click that again, you moron.”
A programmer maintaining a legacy system has been told to add an error dialog, and decides to use the output of existing behind-the-scenes logging to power it. Users are suddenly faced with messages such as “Holy database commit failure, Batman!” when something breaks.
Someone mixes up the test and live administration interfaces, and does some “funny” data entry. ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.