Category: Code

• July 21, 2017

  Fewer changes are faster to deploy than fewer changes

  Itamar Turner-Trauring, Incremental results: how to succeed at large software projects: Faster feedback… Less unnecessary features… Less cancellation risk… Less deployment risk… 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏  read the whole thing, Itamar’s tale is well told. Consider: incremental approaches consist of taking a large scope and finding smaller, still-valuable scopes inside of it. Risk is 100% proportional to scope. […]
• July 17, 2017

  TIL: divide by 10 with this one weird number

  Running an application across two physical databases is not a straightforward thing. One of the relatively easier ways to do it involves assigning each database instance a shard number and then arranging for all your primary key IDs to end with that number. For example, shard 0 generates IDs like 1230, 40, 482340, shard 1 generates […]
• June 19, 2017

  OAuth2 🔥-takes

  Is it too late to do hottakes for something that’s been around for nearly a decade? OAuth2 pros: I can allow other sites to use my data with some confidence that, at least, my authentication information won’t leak It has made really cool stuff possible at my current workplace and workplace-2 Libraries to make it […]
• June 15, 2017

  The emotional rollercoaster of extracting code

  There’s a moment of despair when extracting functionality from a larger library, framework, or program. The idea grows, a seed at first and then a full-blown tree, that the coupling in this functionality isn’t all bad. A lot of people talk only about coupling and leave out cohesion. They aren’t mutually exclusive! When the two […]
• May 17, 2017

  More ideas for framework people

  A few months ago I wrote about Framework and Library people. I had great follow-up conversations with Ben Hamill, Brad Fults, and Nathan Ladd about it. Some ideas from those conversations: use a well-worn framework when it addresses your technical complexities (e.g. expose functionality via the web or build a 3-d game) and your domain […]
• May 15, 2017

  Did you try editing the right file?

  The first few years of my career, I edited the wrong file all the time. I could spend hours making changes, wondering why nothing was happening, until I realized I’d been tinkering in the wrong place because I was misreading a file path or not paying close enough attention to control flow. Fast forward to now, […]
• April 24, 2017

  Chaining Ruby enumerators

  I want to connect two Ruby enumerators. Give me all the values from the first, then the second, and so on. Ideally, without forcing any lazy evaluations and flat so I don’t have to think about nested stuff. Like so: xs = [1, 2, 3].to_enum ys = [4, 5, 6].to_enum [xs, ys].chain.to_a # => [1, […]
• April 18, 2017

  Stored Procedure Modern

  The idea behind Facebook’s Relay is to write declarative queries, put them next to the user interaction code that uses them, and compose those queries. It’s a solid idea. But this snippet about Relay Modern made me chuckle: The teams realized that if the GraphQL queries instead were statically known — that is, they were […]
• April 4, 2017

  Feedback: timing is everything

  With feedback, like jokes, timing is everything. Good feedback at a bad time won’t do the trick. I’ve mostly experienced programming feedback through pull requests. This is way better than no feedback. However, since most pull requests occur at the end of work, and not somewhere in the middle, some kinds of feedback are not […]
• April 1, 2017

  Practically applying Clojure

  Fourteen Months with Clojure. Dan McKinley on using Clojure to build AWS automation platform Skyliner: The tricky part isn’t the language so much as it is the slang. Also, the best and worst part of Clojure: When the going gets tough, the tough use maps This is probably better now that specs and schema are popular. Before, when they were […]