Play the Game
I once had a boyfriend. We used to talk about work a lot. We worked in the same department at the same workplace, so there was a lot to discuss. Working together could be a bit overbearing at times (see also: the break up). But I loved his observations and wry musings on professional life. After each day we would wind down outside on his patio and talk about the day.
Postmodern Programming Today
I recently read a paper called Notes on Postmodern Programming by James Noble and Robert Biddle. This is a striking title. Postmodern makes you think of English literature students clicking their fingers to slam poetry at smoky jazz clubs. Not dorky software developers. But the paper is in fact a real gem to read. It was written 20 years ago but its ideas still ring true today. So I thought it would be worth reflecting on postmodern programming with a, well, modern lens!
Book Report - Straw Dogs
I recently read Straw Dogs by John Gray. It was part of my summer reading and I finished it on a boiling hot beach in Northland. When I returned to my home of Wellington I visited a friend’s place for tea. We talked animatedly about what we had done, seen, and read on holiday. As the caffeine urged on our conversation I told her what I had read in Straw Dogs.
The Database Streamy Weamy Pattern
A few years ago I was introduced to an interesting ebook called Designing Event Driven Systems. In it the author Ben Stopford outlines how to build business systems using Apache Kafka. I was a young impressionable developer and the book turned my understanding of system design on its head. At the time I was working at a small software monitoring company. Our system took in hundreds, sometimes thousands, of requests per second.
P/PC: a productivity principle for programmers (and other people)
It’s so easy to make your dreams come true. All you need are goals! Just write them down - promise to read one book per week, do 100 push ups every morning, and learn French fluently. The next day, do less than half of what you planned. After one week, do none and forget about everything completely. Then wait until the next crisis has you scribbling new goals optimistically at 3am.
Using the Visitor Pattern with React to write even more reusable components
The cool thing about design patterns is that, even if you don’t read the Design Patterns Book, you’ll discover them yourself. In nature, natural selection causes unrelated species to converge on an optimal trait, as in the body shapes of dolphins, sharks, and penguins. Like animal species, we programmers converge on ways to solve common problems. Last week, after writing a login, signup, place-order, and edit-settings form, I got sick of writing the same React form over and over.
The Problem with Smurf Speak
You know how the Smurfs substitute almost every word for smurf? This is known as Smurf speak in the comics and TV show. We software developers also Smurf-speak. What we tend to do is put our company or product in the names of modules, classes, and functions. Classes like McDonaldsPendingOrder and GoogleDocsMainMenu have redundant prefixes. Yet PendingOrder and MainMenu are perfectly good names and give you the same information. I am going to outline why you don’t need to Smurf speak, and give a few tips to help you avoid it.