Dalton Filho

Regular Expressions are one of the most overlooked things in programming. A simple search on Google for form validation returns many cook-book style tutorials that help making things worse by just showing an ugly finished expression (or an even uglier string parsing function). Because it’s so easy to shy away from regular expressions just by seeing them finished, I’ve decided to demonstrate a regular expression construction step-by-step. The expression will validate an hh:mm:ss time pattern.

In our pursuit to become better professionals, it is common to get stuck in the multitude of choices in which to invest our time and energy. In the “My Job Went To India” book, Fowler describes how a mentor helped him by narrowing down the list of infinite choices to a set of just three, hence the “find a mentor” recommendation. As for myself, I have looked for mentors plenty of times, just to end up with lists of things to learn that were more biased than helpful. What struck me is the fact that most of these things were really important, and could improve my skills in some way (though some would require a mental leap to imagine how). What was then my objection to those recommendations?