/Antipattern

The Ugliest Pattern In React

- Sebastian Carlos tl;dr: "Maybe the ugliness is a virtue, since it encourages us to completely change the code to enable some of the better alternatives mentioned above — After all, “adjusting state in response to rendering” will always result in code that’s difficult to understand."

featured in #380


Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Email

tl;dr: Includes: (1) Everyone has an email address. (2) Everyone has exactly one email address. (3) An email address never changes. (4) Whenever an address does change, it’s under that user’s control. (5) Whenever an address does change, it’s because the user specifically requested it to happen. (6) Whenever an address does change, the old address will continue to work or exist. And more. 

featured in #348


Linguistic Antipatterns

tl;dr: "This website is dedicated to cataloguing types of linguistic antipatterns and discussing the deeper reasons they cause problems and how to fix them."

featured in #343


Common DB Schema Change Mistakes

- Nikolay Samokhvalov tl;dr: Nikolay covers 18 mistakes, categorized into three big categories of DB schema migration mistakes: "(1) Concurrency-related mistakes. (2) Mistakes related to the correctness of steps. (3) Miscellaneous – mistakes related to the implementation of some specific database feature or the configuration of a particular database."

featured in #320


How I Accidentally Deleted 7TB Of Videos Before Going To Production

- Nikita Brancatisano tl;dr: "The bad news is that this was on Friday, and we needed to have the videos back up at most for Tuesday morning. We had to upload ~8TB of data with a 30MB/s connection. Not ideal, and I had to think about something fast."

featured in #314


Eight Points For One Team Is Two Points For Another Team

- Lloyd Atkinson tl;dr: "In my ongoing quest to explore the problems that are endemic to modern software development, I decided to focus in particular on estimation and the disaster that is “story pointing.”" Lloyd discusses the antipatterns experienced when estimating, including failing to realize story points are an estimate, coercing developers into choosing a lower number, discounting high or low numbers, and more.

featured in #309


One Way Smart Developers Make Bad Strategic Decisions

- Adam Gordon Bell tl;dr: "Tim is a very senior technical lead, and he’s good at his job. The problem put to him is: how do we make sure this doesn’t happen again?" Adam describes the problem - from a technical and organizational perspective - as well as what leads Tim to the common solution that doesn't actually solve the problem.

featured in #298


Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers

tl;dr: 26 falsehoods including: (1) All individuals have a phone number. (2) You can call any phone number. (3) An individual has only one phone number. (4) A phone number uniquely identifies an individual. (5) Phone numbers cannot be re-used, and more.

featured in #243


Why Johnny Won't Upgrade

- Jacques Mattheij tl;dr: Why are users so reluctant to update software? Jacques believes "software vendors collectively royally messed it up," and has a list of specific reasons why software should be updated.

featured in #202


Five Code Review Antipatterns

- Trisha Gee tl;dr: (1) Nit-picking (2) inconsistent feedback (3) last-minute design changes (4) ping-pong reviews (5) ghost reviewer.

featured in #182