Reading: The Best of Software Writing by Joel Spolsky
19th Nov, 2018Joel Spolsky's writing and opinions are evergreen, and his 2004 book The Best of Software Writing shows it.
Reading: Software Engineering Under Deadline Pressure, by Scott H. Costello
2nd Nov, 2018An 1984 paper that models the time it takes to complete a project, and show what happens when you pull are up against bad deadlines. The answer will not surprise you!
Reading Martin Fowler's Recommended Reading on Microservices
31st Oct, 2018Why trying to make accidents rarer can actually make them more common
18th Oct, 2018excerpt from How Complex Systems Fail
Notes on Site Reliability Engineering, by Google
18th Oct, 2018For my own reference, here are notes I took while reading Google's book on SRE.
Just delete those failing tests
17th Jul, 2018If you're responsible for a large, legacy code base, here's my hint to you: delete your failing tests.
Using Moose's "before" method modifier to modify parameters
12th Jul, 2018A small trick to make "before" a bit more powerful, a bit more useful, and a bit more dangerous.
The Post-CAP Reading List
12th Dec, 2017Eric Brewer and Daniel Abadi expand our notions of what the real trade-offs are in the CAP theorem.
The 7000 page Harry Potter book that never was
12th Dec, 2017An scientist's idea of literary criticism is different from most people's. It involves math.
GUI: Taking Lessons from Hand-Drawn Animation
21st Mar, 2017Chuck Jones inspires UI designers in this classic paper from Ungar and Change.
Early example of Duck Typing in 1991's SELF
21st Mar, 2017In 1991 Ungar and Smith wrote about the experimental programming language SELF, and in it described duck typing, callng it behaviorism
One-liner to analyze Python programs
10th Aug, 2016The great benefit of knowing the command-line is being able to write scripts to analyze scripts, all in ~1 minute.
One Parent CSS
2nd Aug, 2016How I write CSS.
HTML5 Semantic Markup is for HTML, not CSS
27th Jul, 2016I hand crafted the CSS for site. It's still a work in progress. I learned that while semantic tags are good for HTML, they're not that great for CSS.
Catches for traditional programmers when learning Python
26th Jul, 2016After a lifetime of programming and compsci education, I've had some issues learning with Python. It screws me up in small ways. It's a wonderful language, but dear god I wish these things were different.
It's easy to dismiss the GoF Design Patterns
21st Jul, 2016font-feature-settings should not be used in code blocks
20th Jul, 2016The problem of learning Object Oriented Design
19th Jul, 2016The greatest problem in learning object oriented design is in the toy problems. The object oriented solution never looks better than the regular solution.
How to write a program, the wrong way
13th Jul, 2016Learn the right way to write a program the wrong way
David Parnas and the roots of good programming design
10th Jul, 2016This paper is considered seminal in Object Oriented Design, but Parnas never mentions objects, and his example program is described in procedural programming terms. The lessons in this paper are applicable to *all* programming methodologies. It's just about smart design decisions.
Reflections on Trusting Trust by Ken Thompson
7th Jul, 2016You can't trust Ken Thompson. He'll prove it.