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What the Flux?
Flux by Facebook is an architectural pattern for using their React library. This post helps explain flux in easy to understand ways.
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Modern Extreme Programming
There was a recent discussion on the Extreme Programming mailing list kicked off by Ron Jeffries saying he wants his XP back. The implication being that Extreme Programming is no longer practised, and that most “Agile” organisations are actually practising Flaccid Scrum – some agile process but little of the technical…
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Bug finding is slow in spite of many eyeballs
"given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" The saying (also known as Linus' law) doesn't say that the bugs are found fast and neither does it say who finds them. My version of the law would be much more cynical, something like: "eventually, bugs are found", emphasizing the 'eventually' part. (Jim Zemlin apparently…
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Modern SQL: With – Organize Complex Queries
The WITH clause adds named subqueries to SQL queries. WITH is also known as Common Table Expression (CTE).
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Sabotage
In many places it seems to have become the norm to celebrate overwork, sleep deprivation and chronic stress. Ordinarily if you reveal that you are unhappy, unproductive and causing yourself mental and physical harm, people will be concerned and try to intervene. However, the expected response to this kind of suffering…
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Lessons Learned in Software Development
Here is my list of heuristics and rules of thumb for software development that I have found useful over the years: Development 1. Start small, then extend. Whether creating a new system, or …
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My bank has an API so I built online banking
I recently attended Mondo’s second Hackathon, and it was incredibly insightful. My first hackathon, and moreover, my first time working…
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Interviewing for a JavaScript Job
“The Carpenter” was a JavaScript programmer, well-known for a meticulous attention to detail and love for hand-crafted, exquisitely joined code. The Carpenter normally worked through personal referrals, but from time to time a recruiter would slip through his screen. One such recruiter was Bob Plissken. Bob was…
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How to Write a New Git Protocol
I used to have trouble keeping track of my files. I often couldn’t remember whether I saved a file on my desktop, laptop, or phone, or if it was floating around in the cloud somewhere. Plus, with certain information, like passwords and bitcoin keys, I didn’t feel comfortable just sending that in an email to myself in…
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Erlang/OTP architectures: Cowboy
Cowboy is the most popular Erlang framework for writing web servers. It is really impressive to see what cowboy accomplishes with such…
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What is Flask-Admin?
So what is Flask-Admin ? I'm seeing a lot of misunderstanding about the project. Typical Flask advice regarding administrative interface looks like this - "just write one from scratch, all these CRUD frameworks are very limiting". Well, I can't agree with the opinion and going to explain why.
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Bloomberg Runs on 25M lines of Fortran (2006)
One of my colleagues is ex Bloomberg. He tells me there's only one thing I need to know about them: "25 million lines of Fortran !" Apparently they have 1500 coders firefightin…
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Source of the famous “Now you have two problems” quote (2006)
As I mentioned in my previous post , my Mastering Regular Expressions book was just reviewed on Slashdot . One thing that struck me in reading all the resulting comments was the (several different copies of an) apparently famous quote that goes something like:
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How to Write Unmaintainable Code (1999)
In the interests of creating employment opportunities in the Java programming field, I am passing on these tips from the masters on how to write code that is so difficult to maintain, that the people who come after you will take years to make even the simplest changes. Further, if you follow all these rules…
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Being Sneaky in C
I entered the 2014 Underhanded C Contest last year. Didn't win, but hey-ho what can you do. Still, I thought I'd post my entry and a write-up of it, in case anyone found it interesting.
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Porting a NES Emulator from Go to Nim
Let me get this straight. We have an emulator for 1985 hardware that was written in a pretty new language (Go), ported to a language that isn’t even 1.0 (Nim), compiled to C, then compiled to JavaScript? And the damn thing actually works? That’s kind of amazing.
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Dark corners of Unicode
I’m assuming, if you are on the Internet and reading kind of a nerdy blog, that you know what Unicode is. At the very least, you have a very general understanding of it — maybe “it’s what gives us emoji”. That’s about as far as most people’s understanding extends, in my experience, even among programmers. And that’s a…
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Branchless code sequences
David Thomas's website.