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.

Probably one of the most well-known books among rubyists, “The Ruby Way” by Hal Fulton with André Arko, has now been updated and released in its third edition. The first part of the book is dedicated to the language itself and covers syntax, semantics, some comparison to other languages and specific issues, like garbage collection, that developers are well served to know when writing ruby.

I started using fuzzy matching when I switched to Sublime Text 2 a few years ago (I currently use Atom, which also has the same feature built-in). The seemingly little improvement increased my productively greatly. It saves a few moments while opening files, but more importantly it prevents context switching. It lets me start working with a file (usually prompted by knowing or wanting to know the contents of it) without needing to think about the location of that file.

Introducing Discrete Integration

Gustave Dutra at Plataformatec, discusses a concept called Discrete Integration. The process described is very similar to what I use at work at the moment. A sort of dialed-back version of Continuous Integration. It reaps a lot of the benefits of rapid feedback, just not as extreme. Feature branches are worked-on until they are at a stable state before merging into master. Good developer communications is encouraged at all stages.

Require Only What You Require

Janko Marohnić presents a well-thought out argument against requiring all code in gems up-front. His concerns are around what this communicates to other developers. The intention of each file or library required is lost as are the dependencies of each individual class. Finally, it makes it harder to clean-up dependencies once the are no longer used. I intend to adopt this style in the next gem I work on. I have actually done a similar thing in some Rails project, with a smaller scope: For example, if a class uses an external service wrapper, I require it on the top of the class even though it’s already required by bundler, as a notice to other developers on the project.

Programming Is Not A Craft

I previously wrote about my thoughts on the Software Craftsmanship metaphor. My main objection to the metaphor is that it evokes imagery that is not helpful to software development and completely unnecessary. In this article Dan North’s tells us that the risk behind the craftsmanship movement lies in putting software ahead of the benefits it provides. My understanding is that so called ‘craftsmen’ pride themselves in delivering value first, but the article did provoke in my a deep sense that there is a lot of navel-gazing going on. Let’s just focus on professionalism and excellence. Keep calm and code on.

Mark Methods Private When You Don’t Test Them

In his usual clear way Pat Shaughnessy writes about when to mark methods as private. Essentially, methods that have tests are part of what is considered the public API of the object. Untested methods and those that are private are not. Ruby performs the most basically check against calling private methods, that can be easily circumvented by using send. However, marking methods as private is more about communicating to other developers what part is internal to the class and should not be relied upon. This is very much in vein with Sandi Metz take on testing