Programming – Page 4 – Software and Other Shenanigans

Don’t try to out-think your users

General Commentary, Programming Comments Off

Jul 042020

Few things are as annoying as when you have a device that tries to be helpful and is completely, and utterly, wrong. Not only are you not gaining any convenience, because you still have to go back and fix it, but psychologically it feels worse because instead of making things better and doing things automatically for you, you’re having to go back and do it yourself anyways. If these were settings users can easily change, then it’s a minor inconvenience because we can update a configuration and be done with it. Sadly, that’s not the case, especially with devices that are supposed to be “smart” and thus figure it our without us having to do anything, or software that doesn’t expose these settings to users.

You need 3 administrative consoles

General Commentary, Programming, Work Comments Off

May 312020

1 of the most iconic components to running software in production are consoles full of graphs and metrics about how that software’s performing. Generally, they’re called “dashboards,” but in my experience you want something that provides the ability to act on the data being shown on the console as opposed to a dashboard which is generally read-only. That action could take the form of filtering or drilling down on the data being shown, or triggering some administrative task. Like with everything else in life, 1 size, or in this case 1 administrative console, doesn’t fit all. If you group the different types of users who have a need for an administrative console, you’ll find they fall into 3 general personas.

Monoliths and service-oriented architectures

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Apr 302020

For some reason, I’ve been seeing a lot of people piping in and saying and/or predicting that monolithic software architecture is going to be making a comeback starting this year. It probably doesn’t help that once I started reading the first article about companies moving from services to monoliths, Google kept highlighting more, but I think the impetus of this was Kelsey Hightower’s unpopular opinion segment arguing that most companies that switch to service-oriented architectures end up creating “distributed monoliths” that are the worst of both worlds. By the way, you’ve likely noted that I’m just using the term “service-oriented architecture” (OK, “SOAs”, because I’m lazy) for both service-oriented architectures and microservices – that’s just to make my life easier – as far as I’m concerned a microservice is just an SOA service with a very small scope.

The Truth About “10X Engineers”

General Commentary, Programming 1 Response »

Sep 302019

A couple of months ago, developers on Twitter started spamming jokes or frustrations about the mythical “10X engineer” in response to this tweet by a startup investor from India. Thankfully, outside of this guy’s original tweet thread, nobody else was buying the “10X engineer” nonsense. Unfortunately, the fact that this guy tweeted it in the first place means there’s too many people out there laboring under a delusion that desperately need to be set straight.

Are you shipping usable components?

General Commentary, Programming Comments Off

Aug 312019

One of the benefits of using Javascript frameworks like React or Vue is that you can build and export your own custom components. This lets other teams in your organization or even external developers build front-ends that have a consistent look and feel across the board as well as follow any style or branding guide you have. That’s great, but think about the components you’re putting out there for developers to use. Are you putting out the bare minimum or are you shipping front-end tools that speed development up and make people’s lives easier (you know, the whole point of shipping front-end components like this)?

The trouble with Redux

Programming Comments Off

Jul 312019

Do any research into current front-end development, and you’ll hit React pretty quickly. As far as modern Javascript frameworks go, React is probably the standard Javascript framework used by startups and other companies that haven’t already heavily invested in another front-end framework. While React does a decent job of packaging up HTML and Javascript into reusable components, there’s been some design decisions around handling application state in React, namely by using a framework called Redux, that make developing applications harder than it has to be, and make it worth your while to look for other options before you start falling into its rabbit hole too.

Is there a future for Java?

General Commentary, Java, Programming Comments Off

Apr 302019

I’ve been developing in Java since late 2009. It’s a good language, but I’m starting to wonder what kind of future it has. I’ve been using Java 8 since shortly after it came out, even though Java is currently on version 11. Java’s obviously still being developed, so why not move forward? A big part isn’t the infamous module system that launched in Java 9, and broke a lot of stuff. Part of it is the fact that Java is owned and controlled a by a company that seems more interested in rent-seeking off oa Java than doing anything innovative with it.

Software should have a strong opinion

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Mar 312019

Software is written to solve a problem. Sometimes, it’s more than one problem, but you get the idea. Being someone who both uses and writes software, I’ve found the best software out there doesn’t just solve a problem, but was written with a clear and definitive opinion about how that problem should be solved. That’s not by accident or coincidence, it’s very much causal.

Tuning your code

Programming Comments Off

Oct 312018

I got a comment on my post about performance tuning a REST API call asking about code tuning with examples. I don’t have code examples handy, but I can certainly run through some general performance tuning tips I’ve found over the years. No matter where you find advice about improving your code’s performance, keep in mind that every situation is different, and those differences could impact the relevance and usefulness of any advice offered.

Minimum viable products – the most difficult products to build

General Commentary, Programming Comments Off

Mar 262018

Probably 1 of the most difficult juggling acts in software development is scoping a minimum viable product. I’m pretty sure a lot of that comes from the juggling act and judgement calls that constitute defining said minimum viable product. It’s not easy to do, mostly because defining a minimum viable product involves balancing 2 mutually exclusive terms. That said, I think you can find the best set of tradeoffs en route to the minimum viable product by examining the principles behind each part and then combining them back together once we understand what we’re looking for to satisfy each keyword.

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