Notes

This is my digital garden. You can read more about this collection of notes. You might be interested in What’s top of mind for me now.

• About these notes
• A globally-available filesystem is a security liability
• A globally-available filesystem prevents access tracing
• A good hyperlink has enough context to work around broken URLs
• A good markup language is resilient against failure
• A microservices architecture is object-orientation with big objects
• An enum with two choices is different from a boolean
• Approaches to naming products
• A project is not a product
• Artificial slowdown as a way to guide deprecation
• A “shipped” Slack channel for celebration and release notes
• Asynchronous working environments make it easier to divide up time
• Audience of my web site
• A “users” table is a smell
• Auto-expanding CLI command invocations hinders forward compatibility
• Avoid naughty words in hex digest strings by changing the set of characters
• Backwards compatibility (for behavior) is tough to get right
• Budget for replacing past purchases
• Budgeting categories
• Bug report format
• Build processes should only generate new files
• Cities: Skylines: What I’d like to have
• Code in a good programming language does not reveal its author
• Common function names
• Contents of my web site
• Double-entry bookkeeping is accounting’s law of conservation of energy
• Drive change by writing structured proposal documents
• Fast code reviews are crucial for team velocity
• For a good gaming session, set a goal
• Fun facts about myself
• Get people on board with breaking changes by radiating intent
• Good human-usable tokens are not random strings
• Grammar must serve communication
• Have a dot-com domain for your full name
• Hierarchies are resilient
• How to grow friendship circles
• How to write a good README for a product
• Importing notes from Bear
• In hindsight, we didn’t need masks
• It is hard in Nanoc to use reusable view components
• Lightweight markup languages are inadequate for technical writing
• Logging and caching are (usually) acceptable side effects
• Logistics games can teach you engineering
• Logistics games teach you about tech debt
• Minimal language with arrays in Ruby
• “Mirroring” is using hyperlinks for the mind
• Module systems in programming languages
• My pronouns
• Naming principles
• Nanoc needs file paths to be known before compilation starts
• Nanoc needs --json so that the CLI can be used programmatically
• Nanoc’s in-memory approach limits scalability
• Nanoc sites take too long to load
• Nanoc’s terminology is inconsistent with the industry
• Nanoc’s use of Ruby is not an appealing choice these days
• Notes are not articles
• Offices and creativity are at odds
• Organize electronic archive by year
• People are bad at identifying invisible threats
• Perpetual interests
• Phrase suggestions as open questions
• Programming language design
• Ruby can be slow for short-running apps because it needs to load (require) dependencies
• Separate code reviews into feedback levels
• Short-form content doesn’t need to be written as a chronological sequence of blog posts
• Short-lived branches are indispensable for refactoring
• Sourdough bread
• Speed can mean latency or throughput
• Spreadsheets are fragile
• Spreadsheets are fragile because cells have no names
• Spreadsheets are fragile because they only deal with cells
• Standard exit codes
• stderr is for all diagnostic output
• Syntax styles in programming languages
• Taking a break is better than excess context switching
• The filesystem is global mutable state
• The format of a note
• There are many embedded plaintext metadata formats
• The type of projects I’d like to contribute to
• The web tooling in the Node ecosystem is closed
• Too easy in Nanoc to get undefined behavior
• Toolbox
• Tooling for a good programming language
• URLs and paths require special word-breaking rules
• Use Docker tags to document the lifecycle of an image
• Use stdin and stdout, but allow overriding
• UX matters for developer tools
• What’s top of mind
• What would I change about programming language X?
• What would I change about Ruby?
• Why can’t I git-push to a remote filesystem?
• You are not paid to be busy
• You might not need React