Understanding SQL JOIN

Edward Loveall explains a useful frame of mind to understand SQL JOIN statements. The key to understanding them is to know that the SQL statement will act on one relation (called a table in the article). What JOIN statements do, is create a new relation from other relations (or tables). A follow-up explains GROUP BY.

A Data Pipeline is a Materialized View

Nicholas Chammas makes the argument that a data pipeline is a form of a materialized view: A data structured derived from a primary source, and persisted. Thinking about primary vs. derived data resonates with me, and is one of the main take-aways from Designing Designing Data-Intensive Applications.

Do You Need an Event Bus? A Quick Overview of Five Common Uses

The thing that surprised me the most about this article by Lyric Hartley, is that in all 5 examples, the event bus (Kafka) is always fed from a database. It is always used as derived data, and never as a primary. While I think that is a lot of the real-life use cases out there, it leaves out the architectures, like event-driven, that use the even bus as a primary source.

Maximizing Developer Effectiveness

Effective developers need to have an environment that supports them. Effectiveness is highly correlated with short feedback loops, at different levels. These should be optimized so they are quick, simple and impactful for developers.

Context switching costs more than we give it credit for

Context switching is a productivity killer. Multi-tasking is a myth. Mayank Verma advocates for batching work, as a way to be more productive. I think that is a fine tactic. Strategically, the takeaway is that protecting your attention will make you more productive.

That’s not how 2FA works

Terence Eden illustrates why security is hard. Even “techbros” that are security-conscious enough to turn two-factor authentication (2FA) on, sometimes misunderstand what type of attack it protects against. In this example, the misunderstanding is that 2FA is designed to assure the server that you are really you. It doesn’t give you any assurances that the server is who it says it is.

Command Line Interface Guidelines

An open-source guide to help you write better command-line programs, taking traditional UNIX principles and updating them for the modern day.

This is a great idea. CLI programs might not have a graphical interface, but there is still user experience to consider. This guides provides a starting point, with rationale behind the philosophy of the guide. In particular, I was pleasantly surprised by the author’s humbleness:

It’s ironic that this document implores you to follow existing patterns, right alongside advice that contradicts decades of command-line tradition. We’re just as guilty of breaking the rules as anyone.

The time might come when you, too, have to break the rules. Do so with intention and clarity of purpose.

What Shape are You?

The article has an interesting metaphor: In collaboration teams, the shape of your work is important. The work that someone does can leave gaps that can be left undone that no one else is really capable of doing. For example, if you don’t write tests or comment your code, it is really hard for the rest of the team to compensate and do that for you. They don’t have enough context.

Another interesting concept is that some work can be either additive or subtractive. Additive would be something like making widgets. The more you do, the better. Software projects are subtractive: We keep working until we have done all the work that is left. In this sense, someone can do a lot of work in a team – even more than anyone else – but still leave gaps that prevent the project from succeeding.

I don’t think the subtractive analogy is quite true: Software projects are not really a static set of work. It can grow and shrink, while still being successful. That is the reasoning behind MVPs, or prioritizing work to deliver value. In fact, the software projects that I work on, are not really ever done. The software continues to evolve. The author comes from a gaming background, which might explain a different mentality. In any case, software does have a subtractive quality to it: Some of the work needs to be done by someone, and a team member that leaves gaps requires others to take that up.

Climbing Steep hills, or adopting Ruby 3 types with RBS

Ruby 3.0 was just released. It includes RBS, a language to describe type signatures for Ruby programs. In this post Vladimir Dementyev explains in hands-on detail how to use RBS to add types to Ruby programs. The type system is designed to be gradual. It makes it easier to start adopting it. Of course, the more type information is provided, the more effective the type-checker is.

Why Ruby Class Methods Resist Refactoring

Sasha Rezvina explores why class methods in Ruby are hard to refactor. They tend to accumulate lots of logic. I prefer limiting class methods to “builder” methods that instantiate new objects, like .initialize.

Verbal Expressions: Ruby Regular Expressions made easy

This looks like a fantastic library. It provides a way to “verbally” construct regular expressions:

tester = VerEx.new do
  start_of_line
  find 'http'
  maybe 's'
  find '://'
  maybe 'www.'
  anything_but ' '
  end_of_line
end

tester =~ "https://www.google.com"

It supports string replacement, and capture groups too!

Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

This article illustrates one of my worries about the server-less trend: Each lambda function might be simple, but there interactions are not, and that is hard to reason about (and deploy!).

When the building blocks are too simple, the complexity moves into the interaction between the blocks.

Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method

The Zettelkasten method is a sort of personal note-taking method. This articles explains why the method is interesting in the first place, it’s principles and a few possible ways of using it. I’ve been gravitating in the last few years to a similar method, which doesn’t quite adhere to all the principles. I’ve long known that writing things down helps clarify your thoughts; having to articulate your thoughts, makes you a better thinker. It also helps with knowledge retention. What struck me most as I read this article is that there is another level of value that comes from the effect of capturing more things and linking thoughts together. That is what turns facts into knowledge: Knowing how it relates to other thoughts.

As I was reading, I noticed that I often capture thoughts in my daily note. That is better than not capturing at all, but it doesn’t make it discoverable in the future. Since reading the article, I’ve started creating separate notes for each individual “thought” and tagging it. I am also making an effort to link – at the time of writing – with other notes.

The Pyramid Principle

Shiva Prabhakaran at Models HQ writes about the Pyramid Principle, which recommends that you start communicating with your answer/hypothesis first and then support it with arguments and data.

My natural instinct when speaking, is to do something similar to this recommendation (but not quite): Start with the answer, and then add context. This recommendation goes a bit further: Answer, summary, and then supporting arguments.

When writing, my instinct is more to start from the context, walk through the rationale and arguments, and then get to the conclusion. That follows my train of thought, which I expect my readers to follow. This article explains why it might be better to start in the other direction.

The recommendation comes from consulting companies and their communication with executives. Its applicability might be limited.

Rbspy

This week I found myself working on optimizing the performance of a refactored Rails endpoint. I found rbspy:

rbspy lets you profile Ruby processes that are already running. You give it a PID, and it starts profiling. It’s a sampling profiler, which means it’s low overhead and safe to run in production.

rbspy lets you record profiling data, save the raw profiling data to disk, and then analyze it in a variety of different ways later on.

This made it painless to get data on a running process without much fuzz. It even generates flamegraphs.