/Best Practices

Six Ways To Shoot Yourself In The Foot With Healthchecks

- Phil Booth tl;dr: (1) Aggregate other services into your app’s healthcheck. (2) Set a short timeout on healthcheck requests. (3) Set a long timeout on healthcheck requests. (4) Leave a long delay before starting healthchecks on new instances. (5) Set a low threshold on consecutive failures before turning unhealthy. (6) Set a high threshold on consecutive successes before turning health.

featured in #419

8 Annoying A/B Testing Mistakes Every Engineer Should Know

- Lior Neu-ner tl;dr: (1) Including unaffected users in your experiment. (2) Only viewing results in aggregate (aka Simpson's paradox). (3) Conducting an experiment without a predetermined duration. Lior discusses these and 5 more anti-patterns.

featured in #416

How To Survive Your Project's First 100,000 Lines

- Evan Ovadia tl;dr: The Vale compiler hit its 100,000th line of code - this article explains how it was kept from collapsing. “Some of these software engineering techniques came from my time at Google, though ironically most came from my work on the Vale compiler and game development so some of these might be surprising to my engineer comrades out there.” Techniques range from determinism, to testing, to type-system techniques, to general architectural best-practices.

featured in #411

A Beginner's Guide To Prompt Engineering With GitHub Copilot

- Rizel Scarlett tl;dr: “After more experimentation, I improved my communication methods with GitHub Copilot by providing context, examples, and clear instructions in the form of comments and code. In this blog post, I'll discuss top tips to help you get the most out of GitHub Copilot.”

featured in #411

Taming The Nested Beast

- Eliran Turgeman tl;dr: “I believe that the downsides of overly nested code are well known and covered, it mainly revolves around readability and maintainability, and I won’t go into more details in regards to that. I’d like to focus on the techniques to flatten an overly nested code, but before doing so, you should keep in mind that flattening your code isn’t always the answer.”

featured in #405

Building Webhooks Into Your Application: Guidelines And Best Practices

tl;dr: Webhooks are a common way for developers to receive events from your app. But sending webhooks is deceptively complex to do, with lots of edge cases and key design decisions you need to get right. This post walks through how to build a great webhook experience in your app with helpful suggestions and best practices.

featured in #404

Building For Enterprise: The Developer’s Guide To SSO

tl;dr: Single Sign-On via SAML or OAuth is often one of the first features an engineering team needs to build as a product gains traction among larger customers. We explore how it works, how to add it to your app, and best practices for implementation.

featured in #397

Vim Best Practices For IDE Users

- Sebastian Carlos tl;dr: “If you don’t have time to read the Vim User Manual, I sifted through it for you with a focus on IDE users.” A deep dive into all aspects of VIM.

featured in #397

5 Tips To Creating A (Good) Pull Request

- Danijela Vrzan tl;dr: (1) Keep it short. (2) Add more information i.e. the what, why and screenshots. (3) Leave in-line code comments. (4) Assign people or groups as reviewers. (5) Let your colleagues know your PR is ready for review.

featured in #390

Refactor Your Code - Don’t Be Like Southwest Airlines

- Shanea Leven tl;dr: Devs don’t have a way to communicate the complexity hidden in their code to business leaders — they lack code visibility tools. As a result, refactors aren’t prioritized until you have a Southwest-sized crisis. Here’s 9 tips to avoid being southwest.

featured in #384