C#

I recently did a project for a client that needed a way to share a bit of live data with an external organization. He originally asked for a simple website with authentication and an API. I could have built this, but for the frequency and volumes of data they were using, I suggested a simpler approach: a Google Sheet and a recurring job that updates it.

Any online spreadsheet is a great way to share a small amount of data. Users can filter, sort, make formulas, export the data, or even write their own integrations. It’s also possible (depending on how changes are handled) to manually annotate or override data that’s been exported. Implementing all of this in a custom web page is possible, but some of it is pretty tricky.

Making a program work for the happy path is not always easy, but given enough time I believe pretty much anyone could do it. When a professional takes on the task however they will make it work for more than just the happy path, and do it with code that is easy to debug, and easy for others to understand and change. Since so much of what we end up dealing with are exceptional flows, we need a concise way to deal with them. Fortunately we have the aptly named exception pattern.

I was conducting technical interviews recently for a senior developer position. I like to talk about a bunch of things, but there is one question I particularly enjoy asking each candidate. Write an implementation for this:

int Average(int a, int b)
{

}

It’s a great question because it’s a simple problem, and anyone that comes through the door should know the formula without having to ask. It’s interesting how people react to it sometimes, but I chalk it up to interview jitters. About half the people interviewed answer like this: