Month: September 2013

Career and skills advice

By jonskeet

It feels a little odd even to write this post, but I receive quite a few emails asking me for advice on how to get better at programming, how to get through interviews, whether it’s better to be a generalist or a specialist etc. I want to make it very clear right from the start, I am not a career guidance expert. I have very little evidence that this is good advice, and it may well not be good advice for you even if it’s good advice in general. Oh, and don’t expect anything shockingly insightful or original, either. You … Continue reading Career and skills advice

Casting vs "as" – embracing exceptions

By jonskeet

(I’ve ended up commenting on this issue on Stack Overflow quite a few times, so I figured it would be worth writing a blog post to refer to in the future.) There are lots of ways of converting values from one type to another – either changing the compile-time type but actually keeping the value the same, or actually changing the value (for example converting int to double). This post will not go into all of those – it would be enormous – just two of them, in one specific situation. The situation we’re interested in here is where you … Continue reading Casting vs "as" – embracing exceptions