The longest project

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Source: own resources, Authors: Agnieszka and Michał Komorowscy

I haven't been blogging for 4 months and it's the longest break I've ever had. Why? Was I sick? Did I have no ideas what to write about? Did I have no time? Did I have too much work? Fortunately, nothing of that. The reason is completely different and probably surprising. So, I finished the longest project in my life.

• The project that I started in 2009.
• The project that for all these years was somewhere in my mind.
• The project that I wanted to abandon over a dozen of times.
• The project that took hundreds or thousands of hours.
• The project that allow me to learn a lot of.
• The project that I would have done in a different way if I had had this chance.
• The project of which I'm extremely proud.
• The project after which I simply had to rest.

What could it be? The answer is PhD in Computer Science. On 12 April 2016 I defended my doctoral dissertation, written under the supervision of Professor Janusz Sosnowski, under the title:

Methods of analysis of information systems based on logs of historical debuggers

Even now I remember how relieved and happy I felt then :)

In my work I focused on the problem of storing and analysing of data collected by historical / reversible debuggers. I performed a detailed analysis what could be and what should be improved when it comes to working with them. In the result I proposed new models of representation of execution traces and I implemented tools that facilitate working with data recorded by historical debuggers. I also performed experiments showing advantages of my ideas. It was a really, really huge job.

Now you may want to ask some questions:

• Was it worth it?
• Why did you do so?
• Did you work professionally at the same time?
• How did you share time between PhD studies with your work? Is it possible at all?
• What did you actually gain?
• How to start PhD studies?
• How much could I earn at the university?
• Would you continue your science career?;
• Why you didn't write about PhD earlier
• And many, many more.

I plan a series of post about doing PhD in the computer science. Many topics will be specific for Poland but many will be general. I want to do that because of two things. Firstly, it'll be a form of therapy for me :) I simply want/need to write about something that was so important to me for such a long time. Secondly, I think that there are not so many blogs/articles about writing PhD so it should be simply useful for others.

If you have any specific questions just let me know.

Two things I learned about HTML and CSS

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I've never worked a lot of with CSS. However, from time to time I do something with it, for example in order to check out new possibilities. Recently, I read about CSS transformations and I decided to give it a try. For the beginning I wanted to achieve a very simple effect i.e. a red square with a blue and a green diagonal lines. It sounds simple and it is simple but there are traps in this exercise. I decided to write this post because it took me a moment to figure out that was wrong. It was also difficult to find a solution in Internet. Maybe because it is so obvious ;)

My idea was to use 3 div elements. One for a square and 2 for diagonal lines. I also wanted to use transformations in order to rotate divs so that they look like diagonals. My first attempt looks as follows. Do you know what is wrong? There are 2 main problems here.

Scroll down if you want to see a correct solution:
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I changed two things, one in html and one in CSS:

• The first problem was that I used div as a self closing tag. It is not allowed. Browsers treat <div /> as <div >. It is quite difficult to spot.
• The second problem was in the greenLine style. It was not enough to rotate the green div by 45 degrees. Firstly we need to translate it in this way: translate(100px,-141px) rotate(45deg). It might be surprising because in the case of the blue div the rotation was enough. However, we we have to remember that the green div is not located in the origin of the coordinate system but just below the blue div. The blue div looks like a thin line but it's height is set to 141 pixels.

Report from the battlefield #4 - Do not waste my and your time

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The Report from the battlefield series is based on my experience as a reviewer. The idea is simple. In order to evaluate programming skills, a candidate is asked to write a simple project. To do so he/she needs to invest some amount of time (roughly speaking a few hours). Taking this into account I assume that he/she must be interested in finding a new job. Otherwise he/she wouldn't spend his/her private time writing a project which rather isn't extremely exciting. The more I'm surprised why some people doesn't care about the first impression.

Here are some examples showing what I'm talking about:

• A connection string used by the application referred to some server that of course wasn't available to me.
• The database used by the application didn't contain any sample data.
• I had to manually create a database used by the application. There was a script but it didn't work without fixes.
• The application crashed immediately when started.
• ...

It's wasting of time from my perspective. It is true that all these problems can be fixed quickly but they require additional effort from me. You can believe me that it is extremely annoying. Instead of making an actual review someone forces me to fix bugs. What's the worst these bugs could be avoided easily with a little bit more effort.

Please remember, the first impression is important. It'll be appreciated if a reviewer can run your application just by pressing F5 in Visual Studio (or in another IDE). You can test it in a straightforward way. Before submitting a project to a review, copy it to another machine and try to run it there. It should work without any additional actions.

Currently, if a project cannot be run without problems I don't make a review. However, I have a soft heart and I give a candidate one chance to fix them. Do you think that it's a good approach? I have my doubts because an employer probably wouldn't do so.

Tips & Tricks: How to tell VS to modify variables in the runtime for us?

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Today, I'd like to share with you a simple but useful trick. Imagine yourself that you are debugging an application and you find a place with the following very simple code:

            
var flag = ReadConfiguration();
if (flag)
{
   //...
}
else
{
   //...
}

The problem is that the flag variable is set to false but you need to check what would happen if it is set to true. Of course you can easily change the value of this variable in Visual Studio. But what would you do if this kind of code is executed dozens, hundreds... of times and every time the flag variable must be set to true? One solution is to modify a configuration, another might be to change the source code. However, all these things require an additional action. It would be much more better to tell Visual Studio to do it for us. How? In order to achieve desired effect we can utilize breakpoints and custom actions. I'll show how to do it in Visual Studio 2015.

Firstly, put a breakpoint in the line with if.

Right click the breakpoint and from a context menu select Actions... Then in the text box enter {flag = true}. You can even use IntelliSense here. At the end click Close button.

An that's all. Now, if you run the application under debugger control a flag variable will be set to true whenever a line with a breakpoint is executed. What's more this trick also works with other types of variables and you can also execute methods in this way e.g.:

At the end I want to say 2 things. Custom actions are usually used to write diagnostic messages to Output window. This trick works because in order to write a message Visual Studio has to execute some code and this code can have side effects. Besides, you can also use this trick in older versions of Visual Studio. The only difference is that from a context menu you need to select When Hit... option.

My list of online editors

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Online editors (testers, debuggers) are awesome if we want to quickly test some code. They are also very useful to check our solution when we want to post an answer on Stack Overflow. Here is my collection of various online editors that I encountered, though personally I use only some of them.

I'm publishing it because it can be helpfull for others and because I'd like to have this list easily accessible in Internet. Of course this list is not complete and there are many other editors. If you know something interesting let me know and I will add it here.

Online Editor	Language / Technology	Share function	Collaborate function
yUML	UML	Yes
draw.io	Diagrams	Yes (via Google docs)	Yes
moqups	UI moqups	Yes	Yes
ideone	C#, Java, Haskell, C++, Ada and many other	Yes
SQL Fiddle	SQL (MySQL, Oracle, PostgreeSQL, SQLLite, MSSQL)	Yes
regular expressions 101	Regular expressions	Yes
.NET Fiddle	C#, VB.NET, F#	Yes	Yes
C# Pad	C#
D3.js	D3.js Java Script library
CodePen	HTML + CSS + JS	Yes
jsfiddle	HTML + CSS + JS	Yes	Yes
JS Bin	HTML + CSS + JS	Yes	Soon
CSS Deck	HTML + CSS + JS	Yes	Yes
Liveweave	HTML + CSS + JS	Yes	Yes
Plunker	HTML + CSS + JS	Yes	Yes
cpp.sh	C++	Yes

By share function I mean a possibility to create a pernament link to our code. Collaborate functions allows a group of developers to write a code together.