Code minutiae, October 23, 2017

For some reason, identifier schemes that are global unique, coordination-free, somewhat humanely-representable, and efficiently indexed by databases are a thing I really like. Universally Unique Lexicographically Sortable Identifier (ulid, for humans) is one of those things. Implementations available for dozens of languages! They look like this: 01ARZ3NDEKTSV4RRFFQ69G5FAV.

Paul Ford’s website is twenty years old. For maybe half that time I’ve been extremely jealous of how well he writes about technology without being dry and technical. When I grow up, I’ll write like that!

How Awesome Engineers Ask For Help. So much good stuff there, I can’t quote it. There’s something in there for new and experienced engineers alike. In particular: don’t give up, actively participate in the process of getting unstuck, take and share notes, give thanks afterwards.

The best time to work on your dotfiles is on weekends between high-intensity project pushes at work. No better time to do some lateral thinking and improving of your workflow. Feels good, man.

Afternoon notes, October 03, 2017

Someone will always have a slicker Git workflow than you. For example,Auto-squashing Git Commits for clever rebasing.

The passage of time is weird, lately. Nonetheless, it’s surprising that the Dynamo white paper is ten years old. Ten years of NoSQL hype. Even from a naive yours truly.

I’ve been using the fish shell for about five months and it is pretty great. A shell with human affordances! It has very good guesses about what I want to do (completions) and what I want it to remember (history). You can configure it with a web interface or regular-old dotfiles. It doesn’t do anything bizarrely different from your typical Unix-style shell, namely bash, so there’s not much new to learn and when I SSH to a server, I don’t wonder what kind of weird contraption I’m interacting with. I haven’t bothered to learn its scripting language because I’ve decided no one should learn those anymore and they should use Ruby, Python, Go, etc. for that kind of thing.