Category Archives: Software

Robert Graham,

A lot of companies spend a great deal of time, and politically gnashing of teeth among developers, in order to draft style guidelines. This is garbage — it truly does not matter where you put braces, for example. Experienced coders have to be accustomed to reading various styles anyway. Here’s what you should do. Start a program asking anybody who is interested to come in after work in order to draft a new set of style guidelines. Fire everyone who shows up — they are political animals who are likely deadweight anyway. Then just pick a style guideline at random, like the Linux kernel style doc or the WebKit style.

— Errata Security, How to code: lesson 27

I don’t know if I’m persuaded by this, for all that it sounds good. I would expect that some coding styles impose some discipline on coders, making it hard to make careless errors — and easier for others to spot them. Plus shared expectations do make code easier to read and understand.

Then again, maybe modern coding languages have other tools that can notice when you leave out a ) or a }, or mis-specify a variable. It’s been a long time since I actually had to write code anyone else would see, much less work with.

Google search link fix:

This extension prevents Google, Yahoo and Yandex search pages from modifying search result links when you click them. This is useful when copying links but it also helps privacy by preventing the search engines from recording your clicks.

In other words, when I get google search results and right-click on them, instead of getting useless garbage, I get a link I can use in blog post or a footnote — especially handy for linking to .pdf files where the URL doesn’t show up in the program that pops up to display the document.

Most folks won’t need this extension. But those who do will love it.