Magic numbers are numerical constants that have no clear meaning in the code and therefore make code harder to read. Anything that makes code harder to read is something we can use to obfuscate our...
Series: Obfuscation Techniques
Type hinting is a nice tool that dynamic typing languages employ to make code more readable. As you can probably imagine, readability is not the goal with obfuscating code, so we ought to get rid of...
One of the more nasty tricks we have in our obfuscation toolbelt is the reality that text has a lot of visually similar characters. If we sprinkle enough of them around, we can have some tough to...
Continuing the series of obfuscation techniques, I thought up a sinister one recently that breaks the best practice of not shadowing built-in functions. I bet you'll have fun with this one!
While considering the various obfuscation techniques, I was thinking about the role comments play in readability. After all, we've all heard that writing comments is a best practice, yet it's very...
As a community, we spend a lot of time debating best practices. Perhaps it's time we establish actual bad practices. Or as I like to put them, obfuscation techniques. To kick off this new series, I...