Every conference has little themes for me. Here’s one from Philly ETE this week. The opening keynote from Tom Igoe, founder of Arduino, displayed examples of unique and original projects. Many of them were built for one person – a device to tell her mother whether she’s taken this pill already today, or to help … Read morePhilly ETE, Design in the small
We don’t program in a language, these days: we program in systems. I may write Clojure, with ring and schema and clj-http and clj-time and test.check and lein and jetty and many more inclusions. I may write Scala, with akka OR with scalaz and Shapeless, or a weird combination. We never programmed in a language: … Read moreBefore balance, separation.
The octopus is my favorite animal.[1] Did you know that most of its neurons are in its arms? It has a distributed central nervous system. Parts of the octopus can respond to local stimuli, without coordinating. Maybe our organizations should be more like octopi, and less like the central decision-making organism we perceive ourselves to … Read moreCentral vs Distributed Decisions
A long time ago at my Mom’s trendy fast-growing church, the preacher talked about Moving the Dot. This means, recalibrating your strategy every year, so that you’re always targeting (say) 23-yr-olds. That’s a different audience every year. It means you aim to please the people you want to join, not the people already there. In … Read moreMoving the Dot
When I first understood git, after dedicating some hours to watching a video and reading long articles, it was like I finally had power over time. I can find out who changed what, and when. I can move branches to point right where I want. I can rewrite history! Understanding a tool well enough that … Read moreGaining new superpowers
Why is it so hard to estimate how long a piece of work will take? When I estimate how long to add a feature, I break it down into tasks. Maybe I’ll need to create a table in the database, add a drop-down in the GUI, connect the two with a few changes to the … Read moreEstimates and Our Brain
Running coaches get super wound up about the workout schedule, “because it’s the one thing we can control” and because they studied it for years. “We have this cognitive bias to think that it is the absolute key because we invested so much time and effort trying to figure it out.” This is us with … Read moreResponsiveness over Control
Yesterday I watched a Youtube video on how to take down a ceiling fan. It included checking that there was no voltage in the wires, that the wires were detached, that the mount was healthy to accept the next light fixture. The video was helpful and gave me confidence that I could do it – … Read morethe New User Interface
To avoid duplication of effort, we can build software uniformly. Everything in one monolithic system or (if that gets unwieldy) in services that follow the same conventions, in the same language, developed with uniform processes, released at the same time, connecting to the same database. That may avoid duplication, but it doesn’t make great software. … Read moreMicroservices, Microbusinesses
For unit tests, it’s handy to mock out side-effecting functions so they don’t slow down tests.[1] Clojure has an easy way to do this: use with-redefs to override function definitions, and then any code within the with-redefs block uses those definitions instead. To verify the input of the side-effecting function, I can override it with … Read moreFun with Optional Typing: cheap mocking