/Thought Piece

Notes On The Perfidy Of Dashboards

- Charity Majors tl;dr: "Dashboards aren’t universally awful," but they do encourage sloppy thinking, and "static ones make it impossible to follow the plot of an outage, or validate a hypotheses." Charity believes more vendors need to build for "query ability, explorability, and the ability to follow a trail of breadcrumbs." New dashboards should expire within a month if unused.

featured in #245

In Praise Of PostgreSQL

- Drew DeVault tl;dr: "Postgres stands today as one of the most significant pillars of profound achievement in free software, alongside the likes of Linux and Firefox. PostgreSQL has taken a complex problem and solved it to such an effective degree that all of its competitors are essentially obsolete, perhaps with the exception of SQLite."

featured in #243

Zip - How Not To Design A File Format

- Gregg Tavares tl;dr: "I have a feeling this is like many file formats. They aren't designed, rather the developer just makes it up as they go. If it gets popular other people want to read and/or write them. They either try to reverse engineer the format or they ask for specs...Zip is such a format." Gregg dives deep into the construct of a Zip file, how and how to go about fixing its design.

featured in #241

Give Me /Events, Not Webhooks

- Anthony Accomazzo tl;dr: You can't rely on webhooks alone to keep two systems consistent. Every integration Anthony worked with has augmented webhooks with polling due to the fact that "senders typically retry undelivered webhooks with some exponential back-off" & webhooks are "too easy to mishandle or lose." Anthony discusses the advantages of /events.

featured in #237

The Most Precious Resource Is Agency

- Simon Sarris tl;dr: Simon cites how biographies of successful people indicate a form of self-created agency that allowed them to explore their passion, at an early age. Our current educational system creates the opposite system - it cannot "conceive of what to do with children." However, the internet is a new opportunity to learn without permission. It allows for learning by doing.

featured in #235

Finding the Bottom Turtle

- David Anderson tl;dr: "Turtles all the way down" is an expression of the problem of infinite regress, and the post asks "do we know for sure that the programs we’re running correspond to the source code we have access to?"

featured in #235

Crazy New Ideas

- Paul Graham tl;dr: "Most implausible-sounding ideas are in fact bad and could be safely dismissed, but not when they're proposed by reasonable domain experts." Paul advises us to listen and pro-actively encourage these ideas.

featured in #230

Programming and Writing

- Salvatore Sanfilippo tl;dr: Writing a novel is actually similar to writing quality code - "sentences must be well written, but the overall structure and relationship between parts is crucial." A novel is immutable whereas code evolves over time, and is an endless stream of changes. Salvatore's hypothesis is that the initial design of the novel will greatly inform what happen later.

featured in #230

How Can You Not Be Romantic About Programming?

- Thorsten Ball tl;dr: "After a while, more and more, you’ll find yourself in moments of awe," stunned by the size of the " the mountains of work and talent and creativity and foresight and intelligence and luck that went into it." It's hard not to be romantic about programming.

featured in #225

Software Development Topics I've Changed My Mind On After 6 Years In The Industry

- Chris Kiehl tl;dr: Broken into three sections: (1) things Chris has changed his mind on e.g. typed languages are better when working in a team with various experience levels. (2) Opinions he's picked up e.g. adding more technology is rarely a good call. (3) Old opinions that are unchanged e.g monoliths are pretty good in most circumstances.

featured in #223