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Alan Turing’s idea of building a universal computing machine was truly revolutionary and it changed the face of the world. One extraordinarily simple machine capable of carrying out any computation seems impossible. This blog post is a laconic look at the history and operation of the Universal Turing Machine. The goal is to whet the appetite of the uninitiated and inspire them to seek out a deeper understanding of computation.

Change in all things is sweet. - Aristotle

With all due respect to the great philosopher, he obviously never had to write software…

Head on over to Stack Overflow and search for “Immutable Object Patterns in C#” and you will see that this is a point of contention for many developers. Creating immutable objects in C# is cumbersome at best. What if I told you there is a practically effortless way to accomplish this with about one quarter of the code that is used in typical examples. I knew that would get your attention! Hang on tight while I walk you through an exciting demonstration!

For developers using imperative languages (C, C++, C#, Java, Python, etc…), recursion can seem arcane. It’s just not something encountered regularly. However, recursion is a staple of functional programming. Given the functional programming renaissance, it may be time to “bone up”. Even if you have no interest in learning a functional language, functional concepts have many benefits that can be applied to imperative programming (i.e. LINQ, yeah, who doesn’t LOVE that). This blog post is meant to give a very broad overview of recursion for developers who don’t use it much.

I’m not going to proselytize unit testing in this blog post, there are hoards of articles on the internet for that already. Let’s just agree, for arguments sake, that they do awesome things for any software project. In spite of this majesty, brittle unit tests can suck the life out of programmers. There are many reasons for test frailty (a topic for another time), but the main one I’m going after in this piece is adding dependencies. In short, adding a new dependency to any class makes the existing tests fail. Is there anyway of getting around this? Yes there is!

I’ve recently talked to several experienced developers that struggle with the async/await keywords introduced in .NET 4.5. There are literally hundred of good articles out there on the topic; however, they continue to struggle with two misconceptions. The first is that the async keyword is just another way to do multithreading. The other is that multithreading and asynchrony are meant to improve performance. This blog post will give some history and dispel these fallacies.