Holger's Blog

When developing software you usually optimise for some aspect of the creation process. There are many things when considering a software development project like accessibility, usability, user satisfaction, delivery/deployment speed (release cycle), correctness of the code/app, developer happiness and many more. Some of these are first level concerns, some are on lower levels.

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Today I want to share a small utility with you. I am a heavy user of Git, for years now. I am confident to use it on the command line, yet I still come back to using the application Tower (for Mac) regularly. Something about a visual representation other than the Terminal attracts me.

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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?

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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?

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Yesterday I got my hair cut. The hairdresser was rather chatty and told me all sorts of things. When her friend came in they went on to lamenting about how bad it is for them. Both dislike their jobs, the payment is bad and they‘d rather do something else. But they don‘t know what…

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“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.

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As I previously mentioned I freelance for a nice client right now. I am embedded into a great team and like working with these people. Summer came and our project manager was about to take his vacation. (He cycled from Finnland to Hamburg in Germany with a friend, in case you were asking. I think that’s great as I am a cycling maniac myself…) Before he started his vacation we groomed the backlog in Trello and scheduled various tasks for me and the other freelancers. I had the seniority in the project during his absence, so I took on the load to manage the others. After scheduling a few tasks we looked at each other and decided to schedules some more, because it felt like these were too few during his three week leave. Then we scheduled some more “just in case” we were super fast.

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When was the last time you needed to display a formatted date somewhere in your applications? Since I work a lot on React (or generally JS) apps these days, I recently had the “pleasure” to format dates in JS. After receiving them from a Ruby API. Which in turn takes the (Postgres) db timestamps and converts them into Ruby (date)time objects. Oh the fun we had. “Of course” standardizations saves your ass in this situation. Usually at least.

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_ 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:

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_ 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.

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