One Way Smart Developers Make Bad Strategic Decisions

So now, when I hear about top-down standardization efforts, I get a little worried because I know that trying to generalize across many problems is a fraught endeavor. What’s better is getting to know a specific problem by working collaboratively and embedding with the people who have the most tacit knowledge of the problem. Standardization and top-down edicts fail when they miss or ignore the implicit understandings of people close to the problem

Hints for writing Unix tools

General good advice on how to design unix tools. I summarize it as: “Design your unix tools to be composable”.

The Code Review Pyramid

The graphic speaks for itself: Spend more time in the bottom, than at the top. Automate what is possible.

HTML powers the web, in great part by providing a way to link to other content. Every website maintainer dreads having broken links: Those that when followed result in a document that is no longer there.

I remember that when I first learned to hand-write HTML (yes, last century) I used a Windows utility called Xenu’s Link Sleuth. It allowed me to check my site for broken links. I don’t use Windows anymore, but wget turns out to have everything I need.

Based on an article by Digital Ocean, I created a script that checks for broken internal¹ links:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Finds broken links for a site
#
# Usage
# find_broken_links http://localhost:3000

! wget --spider --recursive --no-directories --no-verbose $1 2>&1 | grep -B1 -E '(broken link!|failed:)'

It uses wget to spider (or crawl) a given URL and recursively check all links. All output is redirected and filtered to print only the broken links or other failures. The ! before the invocation inverts the process output: grep typically returns a non-zero (error) code if there is no output, but in this case we consider that a success.

Running against this blog found 3 broken links!

Now, my Makefile has a test target:

test:
  find_broken_links http://127.0.0.1:4000

I run it before every deployment (including posting this very post), to ensure I have not introduced bad link :-)

What do you really get from IDE-driven development?

The author reflects on why development with an IDE is not that useful. In effect, it creates a local maximum that can trap you into thinking it’s a global maximum.

In effect, as my friend experienced in his coding class, these sorts of things don’t make better programs and don’t make us better programmers. We end up knowing less than we should and get less than we deserve.

I’ve never warmed to IDEs myself. I’ve typically found them too constraining and wanting to take over all of my development workflow at once: How I setup my project, how I declare dependencies, how I setup my tests, how I compile my code. It feels like an all or nothing affair. I’ve long¹ preferred a programmer’s editor: Syntax highlighting, code navigation, and the ability to automate when I want it.

That Wild Ask A Manager Story

This article references a story that was new to me: The person interviewed is not the same person that shows up for work. This author’s takeaway is interesting. Instead of overreacting, he would do nothing:

The premise here is simple: designing a human process around pathological cases leads to processes that are themselves pathological.

The UX on this Small Child Is Terrible

This is pretty funny. Reminds me of Introducing JIRA Jr. Project Tracking… for kids

In Defence of the Boring Web

I made the exact same decisions as the author to create this very website: Markdown source, a static site generator, little javascript (in my case none), and a minimalist theme. However, I don’t think boring is a good word. My dictionary defines it as:

not interesting; tedious: I’ve got a boring job in an office.

Instead, I would use a word that connotes tried-and-true, simple, adequate for the job. Reliable comes to mind.

On the Various OSS Fauna

I didn’t know about WikiFauna. I like the idea a lot: To outline the different roles that people can take to contribute to the project. I am not sure about fauna as a term, or that calling folks elves, cyclops, fairies, gnomes is useful at all.

Nate Berkopec does a great job in adapting the idea to OSS and correctly points out that most OSS is volunteer work: You decide your level of involvement.

It seems that nowadays everyone is playing Wordle. And for good reason. It is a lot of fun! There is an evil variant, Evil Wordle that is, well, evil:

There’s no word set by default. Every time you guess, I look at all possible 5-letter words that would fit all your guesses, and choose the match pattern that results in the most possible words. My goal is to maximize the amount of guesses it takes to find the word.

Let’s play with unix tools at our disposal. To be on the same playing field, I took a peek at the source in the browser, and downloaded the list of words that are part of the game dictionary: