Detecting Agile BS

I don’t know what I like more about this guide: The fact that it calls BS a lot of what is gospel for many in the software industry, the fact that it’s published by the Department of Defense, or the power-point-y graphics.

Distributed Transactions: The Icebergs of Microservices

In this article, Graham Lea explains many potential pitfalls with distributed transactions, and general advice on how to avoid them in the first place, or deal with them effectively when must.

The solution to distributed transactions in microservices is simply to avoid them like the plague.

Our Software Dependency Problem

Russ Cox writes about software dependencies, and goes into great detail of what dependencies are and what risks they bring into software projects. I found myself nodding in agreement throughout the post. The need to have a good policy towards updating project dependencies has been a pet-peeve of mine for a while.

I came across some code recently that attempted a long series of steps, and on failure issued a notification. Something functionally similar to:

Scaling engineering organizations

Raylene Yung at Stripe writes a detailed post about how to scale engineering organizations. Although in my current role I am not a hiring manager, I find these types of posts very useful for future reference and to see what hiring looks like from the other side. Understanding the system allows you to use it for your benefit.

PostgresSQL: Implicit vs. explicit joins

Hans-Jürgen Schönig writes an excellent technical explanation of implicit vs. explicit joins in Postgres. It mostly jives with my experience: For the most part, the query planner will ensure that the performance is the same. When writing SQL directly, I prefer to use explicit joins. I believe they are more readable.

Datomic: Event Sourcing without the hassle

I’ve never used datomic, but I’ve seen many references to it, especially when reading about event sourcing. In this article, Val Waeselynck explains at length why Datomic is better suited to fix the pain of doing event sourcing with traditional databases. I found it very interesting, even if I am not doing any event sourcing or considering Datomic.

Post-REST

In this post, Tim Bray expands on what he thinks that industry is moving to, to address REST shortcopmings (e.g. latency, coupling, short life).

• Winners: Messaging and Eventing, Orchestration, and Perssisten Connections.
• Losers: GraphQL, and RPC.

Building SQL expressions with Sequel

Janko Marohnic compares the ruby libraries ActiveRecord to Sequel. They are not strictly equivalent, but I believe the comparison is fair because they both provide a way to interact with a database. I found Sequels syntax very appealing. Duly noted for future use.

At the time of this writing, this blog is hosed on NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, and delivered securely over TLS with a certificate from Let’s Encrypt. I previously wrote about how I obtained the first certificate and how to renew it. The process is now even easier, because NearlyFreeSpeech.NET automates the setup and renewal for it’s members.