So good…anyone collaborating on code with other humans should 💯read this. Take a moment to remember the last time you collaborated in a code review. Did your team overcome feedback resistance and manage time expectations? Fostering a healthy mindset is the key to build trust and sharing knowledge with your colleagues.
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Shopify’s engineering team has been doing some serious engineering on their codebase: Shopify is one of the largest Ruby on Rails codebases in existence. It has been worked on for over a decade by more than a thousand developers. It encapsulates a lot of diverse functionality from billing merchants, managing 3rd party developer apps, updating products, handling shipping and so on. It was initially built as a monolith, meaning that all of these distinct functionalities were built into the same codebase with no boundaries between them. For many years this architecture worked for us, but eventually, we reached a point where the downsides of the monolith were outweighing the benefits. We had a choice to make about how to proceed. Click through for a breakdown of the benefits/drawbacks of monoliths and what they build to address the drawbacks without losing the benefits.
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You’re working on a home improvement project. You can choose max. 5 tools. Which ones do you pick? Sort of depends on what the home improvement project is, yeah? If the gig is repairing the toilet tank gasket, I’m likely not going to need my circular saw. But what if I really love my circular saw? I agree 110% with what author Brad Frost is saying here - we have a tendency in our world to get caught up in which tools we like and try to apply them to every situation and rarely ask what the right tools are for any particular job.
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Some people think that usability is very costly and complex and that user tests should be reserved for the rare web design project with a huge budget and a lavish time schedule. Not true. Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford. This article is from the year 2000 (queue Conan O’Brien’s side kick), but it’s filled with timeless goodies. Its conclusions are a straight forward example of diminishing returns, but worth reading how they arrived at them from empirical evidence.
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Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, best known as the authors of The Pragmatic Programmer and founders of The Pragmatic Bookshelf, joined the show today to talk about the 20th anniversary edition of The Pragmatic Programmer. This is a beloved book to software developers all over the world, so we wanted to catch up with Andy and Dave to talk about how this book came to be, some of the wisdom shared in its contents, as well as the impact it’s had on the world of software. Also, the beta book is now “fully content complete” and is going to production. If you decide to pick up the ebook, you’ll get a coupon for 50% off the hardcover when it comes out this fall.
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Serving the right code to the right browsers can be tricky. Here are some options… Agreed. Jason Miller, creator of Preact, shares his thoughts on delivering the right scripts to the right browsers.
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This is not another “setting up” a new project with Vue and TypeScript tutorial. Let’s do some deep dive into more complex topics that are usually not covered but are totally required in real-life projects.
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James Long is using Electron to build Actual, a personal finance manager — and of course James is sharing the “secrets” he has learned to minimize the common issues with Electron apps. Some of Electron’s problems (large file size, slower boot up time) are inherent in the architecture and need to be solved at a lower-level. The bigger problems (memory hungry and sluggish) can be managed in user-land, but it takes a lot of care to do so. What if I told you there’s a secret that automatically minimizes these problems? The “secret” is to do the bulk of your work locally in a background process. The less you rely on the cloud, and the more powerful you make your background process, the more you can reap these benefits… Dig into jlongster/electron-with-server-example to learn more.
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I just started reading this (estimated read time: 34 minutes) and I have to say there are some really great tips inside. This one on code comments is pure gold: If you have no idea how to start, describe the flow of the application in high level, pure English/your language first. Then fill the spaces between comments with the code. Better yet: think of every comment as a function, then write the function that does exactly that. Julio warns that many of his learnings are cynical, but it’s gotta be hard to not be cynical after 30 years in this industry…
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Here’s some hard-earned experience on how to validate an email address. If you listened to JS Party #39, then you already know this. If you think I’m about to hand the best regex you’ve ever seen…
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There’s still a use case for tables!! No seriously, there is. If you’d like to learn how to optimize table elements for mobile using minimal CSS, read on… My recent article, Write HTML Like It’s 1999, received far more attention than I ever expected on HackerNews. With this attention came a few comments mentioning how table elements don’t play nice with mobile devices or that it’s not possible to have a useable layout on smaller screens. This simply isn’t true.
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Docker builds can be slow, so you want to use Docker’s layer caching, reusing previous builds to speed up the current one. But there’s a down-side: caching can lead to insecure images. Read on to learn why, and what you can do about it.
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An organized reading list for illustrating the patterns behind scalable, reliable, and performant large-scale systems. Concepts are explained in the articles of prominent engineers and credible references. Case studies are taken from battle-tested systems that serve millions to billions of users.
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Polaris helps keep your cluster healthy. It runs a variety of checks to ensure that Kubernetes deployments are configured using best practices that will avoid potential problems in the future. Provides a dashboard with an overview of how your clusters are doing as well as an experimental “validating webhook” that can stop future deployments that don’t live up to the standards.
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From Conway’s Law, to The Law of Leaky Abstractions — you’ll find links to laws, theories, principles, and patterns useful to developers — curated by Dave Kerr. Conway’s Law — This law suggests that the technical boundaries of a system will reflect the structure of the organization. It is commonly referred to when looking at organization improvements, Conway’s Law suggests that if an organization is structured into many small, disconnected units, the software it produces will be. If an organization is built more around ‘verticals’ which are orientated around features or services, the software systems will also reflect this.
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Some sage advice from Ali Spittel that we all would do well to consider. In my experience, problem solving skills are the most valuable asset we have as developers. (Communication skills are a close #2.)
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This list lives on the Postgres wiki, so it’s as official as it gets. Each Don't is accompanied by a Why not? and a balancing When should you?
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It’s not always a case of debt = bad. Used intelligently, tech debt provides quick fixes to problems and boosts innovation. However, you’ll soon know when your tech debt’s not serving you well. ⚠️ 3 signs your tech debt needs paying off.
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Some time ago I wrote a blog post An Open Code Base Is Not Yet an Open Source Project where I suggested a few important qualities of a good open source repository/project. One of them was the well-written README file. Here I will try to give a few hints on how to create a good README file and what mistakes to avoid. A solid README is a must-have for all open source projects. Thankfully, many folks have been taking their READMEs more seriously as of late. If you’re one of ‘em, check out this post and see if there’s anything you can improve.
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You know we’re curl fanpeople around these parts, and we’re obviously not the only ones (it’s used by millions of people around the world!). In this brief post, Daniel Stenberg lays out seven common reasons people tell him why they use curl. This particular bit resonated with me: No other tool or library for internet transfers have even close to the same amount of documentation, examples available on the net, existing user base that can help out and friendly users to support you when you run into issues.
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From Kira Booth writing on the Plaid blog. …we take an agile-like approach to how we think about process. If our team’s process isn’t working, we talk about it in a retrospective (aka “retro”) and figure out how to change it. Many companies don’t begin retros until they are large and have many processes in place, but we feel that retros are especially valuable at our size and rate of growth. Plaid’s engineering organization is rapidly growing. In the Salt Lake City office where I work, we have plans to grow from 20 to 60 engineers this year. Processes that worked just a few months ago may not work now. A culture of continuous process improvement helps us to stay ahead of growing pains like inefficient collaboration, error-prone coding practices, and interpersonal conflict.
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John D. Cook: I’ve long been impressed by shell one-liners. They seem like magical incantations. Pipe a few terse commands together, et voilà! Out pops the solution to a problem that would seem to require pages of code. Are these one-liners real or mythology? To some extent, they’re both. Below I’ll give a famous real example. Then I’ll argue that even though such examples do occur, they may create unrealistic expectations. I agree with his overall argument, but the good news about the command line is you don’t have to become a wizard to get value out of it. Start small and go from there.
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When I first discovered that nine of my tests were failing due to a broken external API, my first thought was, “Man, maybe I should mock out those API calls so my tests don’t fail when the API breaks.” But then I thought about it a little harder… This is why libraries such as VCR are so awesome.
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Don’t put off slow tests as an annoyance: do the math on how much time your team is wasting, and then spend a commensurate amount of time speeding it up. A week’s worth of developer time this month will save you a whole lot more over the course of a year.
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Almost 6 months ago I have made a decision to move all our frontend projects from Flow to TypeScript. It was a tough battle inside my head. So, I have decided to write it down to help other people to choose the right tool. And not to make my mistakes.
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