jessitron There’s an anecdote in which Gorbachev (or Yeltsin) visits New York (or London, or Austin) in the waning years of the USSR. He is astonished by a grocery store, with its fully stocked shelves and no lines. He asks, “Who is in charge of the supply of bread to New York?” because it is ingrained … Read morea thousand small problems
TL;DR: creating a Promise splits off another path of execution, and the Promise object represents the end of that path. Calling .then adds code to the end of that path. You can think of your program’s execution as following a piece of yarn. this video illustrates the difference between a synchronous program and the same program … Read moreUnderstanding Promises in JavaScript (with yarn and Legos)
I’m writing more over at Medium these days: https://medium.com/@jessitron/deference-or-collaboration-pick-one-13ab798f3192
There’s this church near my house, with a statue of Mary Magdalene. She’s the picture of deference. As a child and as a Christian, I was raised to see deference as a virtue, to find this statue beautiful. As an adult and as a systems thinker, I learned that deference is dangerous. Nora Bateson pointed … Read moreDeference or Collaboration: pick one.
Building a new automation to give power to my team At Atomist, we supply a GraphQL endpoint to reveal links between commits, builds, deploys, and people. Internally, we also use GraphQL to access data in Neo4J. To do that, we need to deploy a schema definition (IDL) to the Neo4j GraphQL extension. Software evolves from simple … Read moreAutomation story: GraphQL schema deployment
There’s something magical about post-its falling off walls. ancient post-its on my own wall I think about this as my team spends time pruning tickets, closing ones that seemed important at the time, but now aren’t worth doing. These are ideas that need to fall through the cracks, to slide down the wall behind the file … Read moreDeliberate impermanence
“Why” is too vague a question. Read my post on medium for the true-in-life half of this post. John Allspaw and the SNAFU catchers are studying incident retrospectives. People ask, “Why did this fail?” and you can learn a lot from that. In this talk my favorite bit is: ask “What made this not be worse?” Focus … Read moreWhy does it work?
“Why” is a terrible word because it’s overloaded. Often when we ask “why” we mean “for what purpose” — we’re looking for intention. In the bigger questions (bigger than one person’s decision), that doesn’t make sense. “Why do we let people buy those dangerous guns?”In a system the size of our country, there is no “for what … Read moreNot “why”
Opening a bag of lozenges: I want to rip the bag, it doesn’t tear. Maybe with my teeth? I want to open it in one step. Slow down, Jess, humans are tool users. Get the scissors. Cut the bag open. Return the scissors. It’s more steps, what fun is that? but each step is easier … Read moresmaller steps are the best steps
I want some code to execute after a delay. I want to do this with promises, in TypeScript, asynchronously. Apparently this is hard. Here is the spell: const sleepPlease: (number) => Promise<void> = promisify( (a, b) => setTimeout(b, a)); const slow: Promise<string> = sleepPlease(500).then(() => “yay finally”);I imported promisify from “util”. setTimeout is … Read moreReference: Typescript asynchronous sleep that returns a promise