Does Organization Matter?

Uncle Bob makes a useful analogy about code organization and physical organization of say, your desk or a library. Organization matter. Sometimes, all we need is a small amount of organization, sometimes we need the Dewy Decimal System

Why (and How) I Wrote My Academic Book in Plain Text

Most developers appreciate the benefits of plain text files since they play so well with other tools, like source control, grep, find, etc. W. Caleb McDaniel makes a great case for using plain text other than for programing code. In his case, he composes his academic writing in plain text and uses open source tools at the end to convert them to industry-standard proprietary formats. Awesome.

The Quality Wheel

A big part of effective communication is sharing the same terminology. It helps with context and allows us to be more specific. Jessitron proposes expanding our vocabulary around what “Quality Software” means. Instead of saying a piece of code is “good” or “clean”, how about it’s “configurable” and “readable”.

While trying to optimize some slow queries in a MongoDB database, I found an unexpected and concerning surprise: Adding an index can alter the results returned by a query against the same dataset.

In order to teach myself Elixir, I have been working my way through Exercism.io, which is a set of practice coding exercises with mentorship from the community. All exercises have the tests written for you and it’s up to the user to write a passing implementation.

Turning The Database Inside Out With Apache Samza

Based on a talk at Strange Loop 2014, this post was eye-opening. Although it’s supposed to be about Apache Samza, most of the talk is devoted to talking about databases in general and what they are good at: Keeping global state, replication, secondary indexing, caching, and materialized views. This high-level view provided me with a lot of new perspective of how to think of databases. The many illustrations in the article are beautiful. Please go and read.

Your Most Important Skill: Empathy

The legendary Chad Fowler makes the case that empathy is a skill that everyone will benefit from developing further. Provides great list of why that is. Most importantly, he also details how to practice.

Git From The Inside Out

Git has often been criticized for having an inconsistent interface and leaking unneeded abstractions to the user. Some of that criticism is warranted. Nonetheless, git is one of my favorite programs. I use it hundreds of times throughout the day, always on the command-line, complemented by tig, the ncurses client for git. This article talks about the internals of git: How it stores data on disk for commits, trees, objects, tags, branches, etc. It is well written, well organized and a pleasure to read. If you read this guide, it will make it easier for you to interact with git because you will understand it’s intrenals. However, I think you should read it because it shows how great functionality can be achieved with software with minimal dependencies and using only the local filesystem as a data store.

I recently came across two interesting posts about the Phoenix framework: A benchmark comparing the performance against Rails and a how-to for creating a simple JSON API. I was interested by the performance characteristics described in both articles. What really got my attention though was the syntax: The feel for it was very ruby-like.