newsletter
Quality
Hi friend.
If you buy a piece of furniture, like a chair, you can compare it with all the other chairs in the exhibition. You can sit on them and compare how they feel. You get a feel for the wood, whether it‘s cheap or high quality.
How do you do that with code? Once the software is released you are able to compare and evaluate. But before?
Trade-offs
Lazygit
What am I doing?
My freelancing since January couldn’t go any better. I am happy, I am learning and I am challenged. But I already know, that freelancing for clients isn’t everything I want to do. This is, and always was, supposed to be the first step into the “right” direction.
I read lots of articles by other freelancers and entrepreneurs who shared the “why” behind what they do. Today I want to do a bit of the same. Perhaps you’ll find it interesting as well?
Daylight saving time
Did you hear about the European Union polling its citizen about whether DST is really necessary?
Because I thought it’s funny I sent this issue an hour later than usual.
I was wondering what happens with our apps and services, if DST suddenly isn’t “necessary” anymore. The offsets for saved timestamps become invalid?
You get to decide
The Inner-Platform Effect
“The Inner Platform Effect is an anti-pattern that occurs when a software system is designed to be so customizable that it ends up being a poor imitation of the platform it was designed with.”
Matthew has started a new series on anti-patterns in software development.
Why are our estimates off, always?
Formatting dates
Reading Code
_ This is another email I am sending while being happily busy with our newborn._
Two days ago I linked you to an article about Livable Code. Today it’s about reading code. While learning software development I often heard the phrase that you should read other people’s code because it makes you better.
I have to admin, I never purposely did so. Well, one time, I followed through the Rails framework to understand how an HTTP request is handled. But that was the exception. It turns out, I am not alone:
Surprises when starting out as a software developer
_ This is another email I am sending while being happily busy with our newborn._
My first job was as a software developer at Ericsson in Montreal, working with the mobile switching center that handles calls in a cellular network. There was a lot of code controlling call set-up, hand-offs, roaming etc, but I was pretty disappointed to see that it was all done with quite basic data structures and algorithms. The most interesting part I found was the code keeping track of roaming subscribers currently in the system. It consisted of one thousand binary trees, where the last three digits of the subscriber number determined which tree a given subscriber belonged to. To find a subscriber, you picked the tree based on the last three digits of the number, then traversed the tree to find the subscriber. Apart from that, it was pretty much only linked lists or simpler.
Big Nerd Ranch
This is another email I am sending while being happily busy with our newborn.
Sometimes things don’t always go as planned. Code breaks, servers crash, or a product doesn’t work – you know the story.
Livable Code
First of all, sorry for not writing to you yesterday. I spent the day in the hospital with my wife. Our second daughter was born on 1:20pm yesterday and we couldn’t be happier. Mother and daughter are both very well. This is the reason why I won’t be able to continue writing my usual emails for the next few days. But I will continue sending you emails. The content will be mostly “written” by other people though. 😉
Today I want to share a recent article by Uncle Bob: Too Clean?
My automated publishing workflow
Books I enjoyed reading
Since I love reading I thought I switch things up for today and share a small list of books I enjoyed (and why I enjoyed them).
All links are no affiliate links.
Maintenance and janitorial activities
Premature optimization
Spaghetti wirings no-one knew about
Let's practice together
The bullshit web and our responsibility
My home computer in 1998 had a 56K modem connected to our telephone line; we were allowed a maximum of thirty minutes of computer usage a day, because my parents — quite reasonably — did not want to have their telephone shut off for an evening at a time. I remember webpages loading slowly: ten to twenty seconds for a basic news article.