• The REPL: Issue 47 - June 2018

    How to GraphQL

    GraphQL is an alternative to REST that aims to be more efficient than traditional APIs and allow fast development, both for the server and its clients. This is a fantastic tutorial introduction and hands-on tutorial, with just enough code samples to get a sense of what it is like to write back-end or front-end code in GraphQL. The content is presented in both written and video form. Nice touch.

    Arel with Wharel

    ActiveRecord, the ORM that ships with Rails, is an implementation of the ActiveRecord pattern. It’s elegant API is one of the things that makes getting started with Rails very convenient. Expressions like user.posts.where(published: true) are readable and expressive. When trying to write more complex queries it falls short. In those cases, I usually fall back to Arel, the relational algebra library that Rails uses under the hood. While technically, it’s considered by the Rails core team to be private API, it’s usually very stable. Unfortunately, Arel has a more verbose API. Wharel attempts to fix that. Like Squeel before it, it adds a bit of syntactic-sugar to make interacting with Arel more expressive. It accomplishes this with a minimum amount of code, making it more attractive to use. The author, Chris Salzberg, explains in his blog post the motivation and code behind the library. I look forward to using it.

    The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration

    The findings presented in this paper are that open-office workspaces actually reduce the number of face-to-face interactions and increase the number of electronic interactions. The belief that this is not the case has always baffled me. In crowded spaces, like a big-city subway, stadium lines, or elevators, people tend to avoid eye contact, protect the little personal space that they have, and generally keep to themselves. It’s a defense mechanism. It’s not that people are unfriendly – it’s just that when you clearly don’t have any personal space, you don’t want to give up your mental space! Clearly, this applies to workspaces as well. If I am sitting with people typing in their keyboard all around me in close proximity, you bet I am going to have headphones on and keep my eyes pointing at my keyboard.

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  • The REPL: Issue 46 - May 2018

    The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

    I’ve often wondered what it would be like to be a published author. Writing a book is a time consuming. Is it worth it? In this post, Justin Garrison covers in a lot of detail the economics of writing a book for O’Reilly Media. I found it very valuable, as discussions about how much money some makes are hard to come by. The bottom line: After a few months of the book being on sale, he has made ~$23/hour invested. The number would probably go up, since the number of hours it took is not going to change, but the number of sales keeps increasing. My understanding is that that flatten out rapidly after release, though. Food for thought!

    GDPR Hysteria

    hysteria | həˈstirēə, həˈsterēə | noun exaggerated or uncontrollable emotion or excitement, especially among a group of people

    Last year, while working for my previous employer, I spent about half my time working on GDPR compliance. The work involved adding features for data export, data deletion for former customers, notifications around both, etc. The General Data Protection Regulation is a big deal for any company doing business in Europe, even if not located or incorporated there. As Jacques Mattheij points out – in a lot of detail – in the tech blogosphere there is a lot of hysteria around what it means. The post does a good job of explaining what it means and how it’s often misunderstood. Don’t miss the follow-up, with actionable advise on GDPR.

    What is a Blockchain

    I am not bullish on crypto-currencies. Actually, if I trusted that there was a reliable way to bet against them, I would. But what is a blockchain anyway? David Bryant Copeland starts from the ledger and builds his way up to explaining how it all ties together and what problem it solves. The article’s subtitle says it all: A novel solution to a problem no one has.

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  • The REPL: Issue 45 - April 2018

    the Origins of Opera and the Future of Programming

    Jessica Kerr writes eloquently about how some groups of people in music, painting, science, and programming produce extraordinary results, like the invention of a novel genre of music. She goes deep into the theory behind it and introduces the concept of symmathesy:

    Nora Bateson points out that there’s more to a living system than parts and interrelations: the parts aren’t constant. We grow and learn within the system, so that the parts don’t stay the same and the interrelationships don’t stay the same. She gave a word to this, something deeper than any mechanical or model-able system, a learning system composed of learning parts: symmathesy.

    I am still processing what this all means. My immediate takeaway is that some teams have dynamics in which positive outcomes are amplified to form a virtuous cycle. I believe this is equivalent to what people mean by “synergy”.

    How I Write SQL, Part 1: Naming Conventions

    This post covers a lot of detail on the naming conventions Sehrope Sarkuni prefers when writing SQL, including the rationale behind for each convention. I agree with most of the conventions. In reality, I am more interested in my team having conventions in the first place.

    How To Index Your Database

    The slides for Baron Schwartz’s presentation at PostgresConf US 2018 cover a lot of detail on what indexes are, how databases use them and in the uses cases where indexes help: Read less data, read data in bulk, and read data presorted. This is one of those slide decks that contains enough information and context without needing to see the talk – not available on video at the time of writing.

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  • The REPL: Issue 44 - March 2018

    Mistakes Rails Developers Make in Elixir Part 1: Background Jobs

    Background jobs in Rails are a common patter. In this post Desmond Bowe explores some of the available patterns in Elixir that can be used instead of reaching for a background queue. The information is very good. In my experience, every time I reach for background jobs, I also need to ensure that jobs survive node crashes. For that, the author still advises to use a traditional background queue.

    A Career Cold Start Algorithm

    Andrew Bosworth (Boz) advocates a simple way to start a new job: Ask everyone what is it that they think that you need to know, what are their challenges and who should you talk to next. This is a great idea, especially in places where a robust knowledge transfer process is not in place.

    Elapsed time with Ruby, the right way

    Luca Guidi explains why the naive use of Time.now to measure elapsed time between starting and ending an expensive operation is wrong. What to use? Monotonic time.

    Remember: wall clock is for telling time, monotonic clock is for measuring time.

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  • The REPL: Issue 43 - February 2018

    What Does OO Afford?

    Sandi Metz is one of my favorite authors, and for good reason. In this post, she talks about affordances (a made up word!) that programming languages give, in particular Object-Oriented languages:

    OO… wants you to replace your procedural monoliths with collections of small, independent, collaborative objects.

    The Lost Art of the Makefile

    Jesse Hallett walks through the basics of make and Makefiles. He talks about targets, how it excels at managing dependencies and how it can be leveraged for a modern Javascript workflow. I don’t write Javascript, but I have found make to be very useful for Crystal projects. I’ve even seen people use it for ruby development.

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