Many thanks for your comment, Google Analytic offers no direct data about the identity of users, but you can find the user information in an indirect way. For example: My site has visitors from 140 countries per year. One of them lives in Nepal and I know about this user: location, operating system, screen resolution, browser version, conversions, search querries, language settings, social interactions, time on my pages, web provider, etc. And Google Analytics stores (if this is not technically disabled) the IP adress. I can't identify the name of this user - but in the case he/she makes a social interaction liked with my site (facebook, google+, etc.) I'm able to identify the person. This is not so thrilling for a technical blog, but if you have this inforation for 66% of all popular pages you can find out realy a lot about his/her activities. (Wikipedia says: "Google Analytics is used by 66.2% of the 10,000 most popular websites ordered by popularity, as reported by BuiltWith in August, 2013") In the case I activate Google Analytics on my site every visit on my site will be stored on a Google server in USA. This information is not realy protected (at least for non US citizens) by access from NSA, et. al. At the moment about 54.000 people work for Google and - I'm sure - a lot have and/or can get access to this information. Don't get me wrong - I like Google Inc. (good products and code of conduct). Lets estimate that they have 5000 people with extended access rights and 99.9% are honest and never do someting wrong. Then five potental dangerous people are left in this organization which may sell information and/or syp you. (NSA has at the moment problems with just one - Mr Edward Snowden) Maybe I'm paranoid, but one person in Nepal which could be prosecuted because of the wrong interests is too much.

Kind Regards Markus

Recently I deactivated Google Analytics for my blog Software Engineering Candies - no tracking anymore! In the past I used Google Analytics to record data about usage, but I decided to stop this tracking and deleted all historical data and reports. If we compain that NSA, GCHQ, BND and all the others agencies spy us, we should stop to collect data about visitors of our own webpages. I know that this will not change a lot, but these are my 50 cents to make the internet a better place. We need the freedom to surf without being spied in every detail of personal life. Maybe you do the same for your pages and/or you share this idea with friends which have a personal page and/or blog.

Kind Regards Markus Sprunck http://www.sw-engineering-candies.com/

Clean-Code-V2.1.pdf[^] This is one of the most complete collection of things a developer should do and things he/she should avoid. Must read for all software developers and technical leads.

Hello Marco, Sorry you are right! Yesterday, I updated another article (Top 11 Things Every Software Engineer Should Know) and wanted to post it. Unfortunately I sent the wrong one. I promise to be more careful in the future. This was 100% my fault. Kind Regards Markus

Tips to Develop Unmaintainable Code[^]

Quote:

The key skill to unmaintainable code is the obfuscation of the code - besides poor design, no test cases and overly complex algorithms. If you really like to write well maintainable code, feel use this as input for things you shouldn't do in your next project.

Be evil but don't be discoverable as a developer who writes unmaintainable code!

Comparison of Ways to Check Preconditions in Java[^]

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The use of preconditions, postconditions and invariants is extremely helpful to develop maintainable code. Unfortunately, we find preconditions quite seldom in real world applications. [...] Guava Preconditions and Apache Commons Validate class are the best choice and have almost the same functionality (just take what is more convenient in your technology stack)

Use Preconditions in your code - this is most of the time better than a lot of comments. but don't use asserts as preconditions

I think you are absolutely right - that it's better to say the correct way of doing things and not to tell anti-pattern and/or wrong solutions. After working more than 20 years in software development it's still mysterious for me, why people don't listen when you tell them the right way. But tell a story in an humorously and/or even ironic way let the people start to listen (in the best case to discuss). This is the goal of this small article. The most important part is:

Share this tutorial with your colleagues and discuss how to improve your current project. A good starting point is static code analysis and unit testing. The best is - to do code reviews within the team to find out what can be improved."

Markus Sprunck

Quote:

Software Engineering Candies[^] This article describes how to write unmaintainable code and have an excellent paid job for the rest of your life. The key skill to unmaintainable code is the obfuscation of the code - besides poor design, no test cases and overly complex algorithms. [...] If you really like to write well maintainable code, feel use this as input for things you shouldn't do in your next project.

This may sound as a pure joke, but it should help to write better code.