Database normalization is often explained as a step-by step process to improve a database design. This is a very unfortunate misunderstanding which causes a lot of confusion for students. Instead, the normal forms should be thought of as a checklist which can be used to analyze a database design for

Despite being a fundamental concept in relational databases, First Normal Form (or 1NF) is often explained confusingly or downright incorrect. This post explains what 1NF really means and is useful for and debunk a number of the misunderstandings. E. F. Codd, the inventor of the relational model, explained 1NF as:

Unfortunately, "unit test" is often understood as a test which only test a single “unit of code” like a class or component. This is a very unfortunate misunderstanding, leading to fragile tests and an overuse of mocking. Originally “unit” refers not to a unit of code but to a unit

I propose a better name for this design principle: The Single Requirement Principle. The Single Responsibility Principle is the most misunderstood design guideline ever, because it has a misleading name. The name have caused many to believe a class or module should only be responsible for one single thing. This

This infamous answer on StackOverflow have reached meme status. The question is about finding opening tags in XHTML using a regular expression, and the answer makes it abundantly clear that this is not possible - and you will surely go mad if you try. The answer is hilarious, and is

Casts are confusing in C#. The syntax itself is simple: (Bar)foo casts the value foo to the type Bar. But this means two very different things for reference types and for value types. For numeric value types, a cast performs a data conversion which may lead to data loss.