The other day we had problems with a service dying. It ran out of memory, crashing and failing to respond to all open requests. That service was running analyses of repositories, digging through their files to report on the condition of the code. It ran out of memory trying to analyze a particular large repository … Read moreDon’t just keep trying; report your limits
A Swede, on American Football: “Are there any rules? It looks like they stand in two lines, someone throws the ball backwards, and then it’s a big pile.” Me: “141 pages, last I checked. It takes a lot of rules to look like there aren’t any.” Later, people talked about error messages. There are so … Read moreA lot of rules
GOTO Amsterdam started with a retrospective on Java, and ended with the admonition that even Waterfall was an advancement in its time. The conference encouraged building on the past, renewing and adding for growth. As our bodies renew themselves, replacing cells so we’re never quite the same organism; so our software wants renewal and gradual … Read moreGOTO Amsterdam: Respect the past, renew the present
Nature achieves more than any human mind conceives. The powers of predictive models and reasoning are dwarfed by a system without a brain. Why? If we understand this, we can achieve such greatness in our teams, and in our codebases. Here’s an abstraction. 3 components (and billions of years) take us from amino acids to … Read moreHow to succeed without knowing how to succeed
Weakness and vulnerability are different. Separate the concerns: [1] Vulnerability is an openness to being wounded.Weakness is inability to live through wounds. In D&D terms: vulnerability is a low armor class, weakness is low hit points. Armor class determines how hard it is for an enemy to hit you, and hit points determine how many hits … Read moreWeakness and Vulnerability