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… Continue reading TIL: divide by 10 with this one weird number
Category: Code
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… Continue reading OAuth2 🔥-takes
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… Continue reading The emotional rollercoaster of extracting code
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… Continue reading More ideas for framework people
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, and I’m pretty quick to drop a raise "BLORP"Â in code I’m tinkering with if things aren’t working like I think they should. All hail puts debuggerering.
However, it turns out I found a new class of this operator error today. I was diligently re-running a test case, expecting new results when the test fixture file I thought was changed was the wrong file. Once I deleted the right file, I was back on my way.
Joyful and grumpy are we who can find new ways to screw up time ever day!
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,… Continue reading Chaining Ruby enumerators
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 not altered by runtime conditions — then they could be constructed once during development time and saved on the Facebook servers, and replaced in the mobile app with a tiny identifier. With this approach, the app sends the identifier along with some GraphQL variables, and the Facebook server knows which query to run. No more overhead, massively reduced network traffic, and much faster mobile apps.
Relay Modern adopts a similar approach. The Relay compiler extracts colocated GraphQL snippets from across an app, constructs the necessary queries, saves them on the server ahead of time, and outputs artifacts that the Relay runtime uses to fetch those queries and process their results at runtime.
How many meetings did they need before they renamed this from “GraphQL stored procedures” to “Relay Modern”?
(FWIW, I worked on a system that exposed stored procedures through a web service for client-side interaction code. It wasn’t too bad, setting aside the need to hand write SQL and XSLT.)
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… Continue reading Feedback: timing is everything
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 mysterious maps full of Very Important State, reading Clojure code (and any kind of Lisp) was pretty challenging.
Make sure you stick around for the joke about covariance and contravariance. Those type theories, hilarious!
Lessons on software complexity from MS Office
I learned a lot of things from Complexity and Strategy by Terry Crowley: In Fred Brooks’ terms, this was essential complexity, not accidental complexity. Features interact — intentionally — and that makes the cost of implementing the N+1 feature closer to N than 1. In other words, the ability to change a product is directly proportional to the size… Continue reading Lessons on software complexity from MS Office
