Some bloggers have strong opinions and are just right all the damn time. Like Joel Spolskey, and Jason Fried. I admire them, but I’ve never been that guy, or been that confident in my opinions. But damnit, some of my oldest opinions hold up. After nearly two decades of professional programming, I’ve looked back and thought about the opinions I originally had. Here are the ones that I’m convinced I was always right about.
25 years ago, a simple question was asked about storage, access times, and economics, and the result was a simple paper. Every ten-ish years since then, an updated paper was written to answer the same question. It’s not a terribly good measure of complexity, but it is enlightening.
Mark Richards runs the Developer to Architect website, and puts out a video every Monday. He has helpfully categorized them. I watched all the videos in the “Soft Skills” category and took notes.
I’ve been reading about failures in distributed computing. A lot of it is thanks to Vaidehi Joshii’s Year of Distributed Computing at https://medium.com/@vaidehijoshi . Here’s small summary of what I’ve learned.
excerpt from How Complex Systems Fail
For my own reference, here are notes I took while reading Google’s book on SRE.
A small trick to make “before” a bit more powerful, a bit more useful, and a bit more dangerous.
The great benefit of knowing the command-line is being able to write scripts to analyze scripts, all in ~1 minute.
After 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.
When I first read the gang of four’s Design Patterns I dismissed most of it as a coverup for the unfortunate parts of C++’s object design. That was definitely unfair, since the strongest benefits of Design Patterns come from managing huge code bases, a fact that I missed with all the small examples.
But even still, I would love a book on design patterns that is built for modern interpreted languages, with duck-typing and no type checking.