alt Hacker NewsOnly a few of these are actual programming tricks. The problem with sharing them is that they'll typically seem obvious to you, since you know them. It's difficult to know what is actually unknown to other people, and if you share stuff everybody knows you risk coming off as arrogant.
Here's one that I think more people should know: avoid branches. If I can do the same thing without an if statement and even a logical expression, the code typically both becomes easier to understand for people and easier to run for the CPU.
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I'm struggling to comprehend how branches can be avoided (or why one would want to, as they are the cornerstone of programming). I can only think how to obfuscate them, which is rarely useful.
A (hopefully interesting) aside about avoiding branches is if you don't need an exact answer but need your code to make a decision based on an approximation over some known range, you can employ a basic fuzzy logic method. Serially add, subtract, or multiply to adjust a value by a handful of weighted inputs then use that value instead of branching repeatedly to choose the right action. You might branch once based on the final value where it would have otherwise been a larger tree of decisions. In fortuitous situations, you may avoid branching altogether.
if you share stuff everybody knows you risk coming off as arrogant.
Or stupid, like all those vloggers posting "ZOMG! Go all in with these secret hidden weird trick iPhone life hacks to level up!" that are just regurgitating what's in the manual.
As we used to say, RTFM: https://support.apple.com/en-us/docs/iphone
>if you share stuff everybody knows you risk coming off as arrogant
I have always felt like my bar for publishing something (even just to internal wikis/channels) is too high due to being overly self-conscious. I think we should try not to validate that feeling by implying that there is a non-negligible number of readers who will think you have a personality flaw because you wrote down your personal collection of tips in a public place, or that those people deserve consideration in the first place.
There is no such thing as "the things everybody knows". There are just too many things. Even a list of basic tips is probably going to contain one thing I didn't know or perhaps forgot. Write-ups like this are where most of my practical knowledge comes from, not RTFM (which I do).