Professional Development – 2023 – Week 24

Image Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/54585499@N04/

.NET

The Right Way to Check for Null in C# (via Nick Chapsas)

We’ve all been taught that this is how you check for null references: if (x == null). However, you can get into strange (albeit unlikely) behavior if the == operator is overloaded. One solution is to use ReferenceEquals(x, null) because it doesn’t take into account overloaded operators. A cleaner solution which Microsoft uses in their own code is this: if (x is null), which uses pattern matching. There’s also the converse: if (x is not null).

Career

The Myth of Productivity in America (via my therapist)

  • “This post exposes the latter form of work compulsion for what it truly is: an irrational and self-defeating ideological myth propagated by capitalist, free-market cultures such as the United States by which you may be destroying your potential for happiness.”
  • “The source of such anxiety is consistently the same. It is the ideology of productivity as conferring human worth and dignity.”