Codetown ::: a software developer's community
Does anyone care to share their suggestions for documentation?
I'm asking because I recently had to change a program I wrote more than five years ago. I'd always thought that I've done a good job of documentation. But going through it was difficult. It WAS pulling apart an Excel in CSV format created and saved off by humans, so there was a lot of exception handling. But still . . . .
- Miek
Tags:
Generally I only put javadocs on public methods, especially ones that are used a lot. I use code comments sometimes, but generally if the code is hard to understand I take that as a "smell" that means you need to break down the code into more methods, refactor, or think about better naming.
Codetown is a social network. It's got blogs, forums, groups, personal pages and more! You might think of Codetown as a funky camper van with lots of compartments for your stuff and a great multimedia system, too! Best of all, Codetown has room for all of your friends.
Created by Michael Levin Dec 18, 2008 at 6:56pm. Last updated by Michael Levin May 4, 2018.
Check out the Codetown Jobs group.

To improve image cache management in their Android app, Grab engineers transitioned from a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache to a Time-Aware Least Recently Used (TLRU) cache, enabling them to reclaim storage more effectively without degrading user experience or increasing server costs.
By Sergio De Simone
Google Research has proposed a training method that teaches large language models to approximate Bayesian reasoning by learning from the predictions of an optimal Bayesian system. The approach focuses on improving how models update beliefs as they receive new information during multi-step interactions.
By Daniel Dominguez
Cloudflare recently announced support for ASPA (Autonomous System Provider Authorization). The new cryptographic standard helps make Internet routing safer by verifying the path data takes across networks to reach its destination and preventing traffic from traversing unreliable or untrusted networks.
By Renato Losio
DoorDash engineers built a simulation and evaluation flywheel to test large language model customer support chatbots at scale. The system generates multi-turn synthetic conversations using historical transcripts and backend mocks, evaluates outcomes with an LLM-as-judge framework, and enables rapid iteration on prompts, context, and system design before production deployment.
By Leela Kumili
Engineers at Netflix have uncovered deep performance bottlenecks in container scaling that trace not to Kubernetes or containerd alone, but into the CPU architecture and Linux kernel itself.
By Craig Risi
© 2026 Created by Michael Levin.
Powered by