Articles by David Bolton

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  5 Programming Languages You May Not Have Heard Of

  Before the Web became ubiquitous, it was difficult to promote a new programming language. The most popular ones were either pushed by a manufacturer (such as Fortran, originally developed by IBM…
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  Examining Undefined Behavior in C++ Programming

  Programming languages such as C and C++ have quirks and undefined behavior. These memory safety violations, integer overflows, and unending loops can really wreck your program (and your day!). So…
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  5 Reasons to Eliminate Technical Debt at All Costs

  Technical debt is the entropy and clutter in your codebase. It increases as developers add new code or modify existing programs, and it means that future developers will have more trouble wrangli…
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  Exploring Microsoft's Adoption of Python in Visual Studio

  You don't usually think of Microsoft and Python in the same sentence. But now, in Visual Studio 2017, you can develop applications in Python, making Visual Studio probably the best Python IDE aro…
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  The Risks of Hiring Rockstar Developers for a Team

  Software development can be a complicated process. Never mind the complexities of the technology itself; people on the team need to work together well, and that’s not always easy. Fortunately, hi…
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  5 Reasons to Avoid Hiring Rockstar Developers

  Software development can be a complicated process. Never mind the complexities of the technology itself; people on the team need to work together well, and that’s not always easy. Fortunately, hi…
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  Deploying a .NET Application with Docker

  Containers are a relatively new phenomenon for Windows. Although containers evolved for 20 years in the Linux ecosystem, they really took off a few years ago with the arrival of Docker. Now, sysa…
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  Python 3.7.0: Five New Features to Learn and Explore

  Given the newness of Python 3.7.0—it was released on June 27—my first attempts to run it on WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) Ubuntu didn't quite go as planned. There's no Debian or Ubuntu distri…
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  Using Linux Natively Within Windows 10: A Quick Guide

  If you're a Windows developer who dabbles in Linux (as I've done for the past decade), you might have gone down one of the following paths: Install Linux on an old Windows PC, or dual-boot on the…
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  4 Fast Python Compilers for Better Performance

  Python is a reasonably fast language, but it's not as fast as compiled programs. That's because CPython, the standard implementation, is interpreted. To be more precise, your Python code is compi…