I came, I coded, I debugged.

Even the trivial things are not A common activity the vast majority of software engineers share is working with code. There are many programming languages out there, some are statically typed, while others dynamically. Some are object oriented, and some are functional. Others are still trying to make up their mind (just kidding, we love you Scala!!). Regardless of the programming language at hand, in the end, working with code means manipulating code. These manipulations can be read-only, e.g., code navigation, or mutating, where existing code is being changed, and/or new code is being written, or both. Not only is manipulating code a very common activity for software engineers, some would argue that this activity is what takes up most of one's time as a software engineer, or at the very least, one of the top activities software engineers spend time on. Other activities includes consuming coffee, debugging, context gathering, etc.  Manipulating code is not trivial. For example, in...

For quite some type I'd been strongly against using C#'s var  keyword. I thought it was counter intuitive, that it was a sign of weakness, a way of saying you were not sure of the type of the variable you had used. But then it hit me, the power that lied within this simple construct had finally sunk in.

I'm a big fan of easily readable code, in fact, my appreciation for code that reads almost English has only grown over the years. Extension methods in C# allow for some nice tricks to take place in this regard.

If you ever got to tango with performance counters in C# (+1, they can be very useful) you might have noticed that the current API leaves much to be desired. Things can get even more cluttered when you have a bunch of them. You have to store the name, help string, and type for each one so you can feed it to the API later on. You'll also need to store an instance for each counter so you can have its value updated. The other day a colleague of mine mentioned that the task of adding a new counter becomes a chore . The good news is, you can make your life easier.