See also: Resources

Miscellaneous:

• Tech in the past wasn’t better
• Backwards compatibility (for behavior) is tough to get right
• How can we build a great product?
• Build processes should only generate new files
• UX matters for developer tools
• Technology needs to have a purpose
• Calling by value or reference
• Generative AI
• Coding challenges
• Why can’t I git-push to a remote filesystem?

Best practices:

• A “users” table is a smell
• An enum with two choices is different from a boolean
• Artificial slowdown as a way to guide deprecation
• Logging and caching are (usually) acceptable side effects

Blockchain, NFT, web3:

• Tokengated commerce is a dystopia
• The blockchain is a terrible idea
• What is the purpose of the blockchain?

Code reviews

Communication:

• How to write a good README for a product
• Drive change by writing structured proposal documents
• Phrase suggestions as open questions
• Bug report format
• Pull request template
• A “shipped” Slack channel for celebration and release notes
• Slack channel naming conventions

Collaboration:

• Short-lived branches are indispensable for refactoring
• Get people on board with (breaking) changes by radiating intent
• The impact of Git, GitHub, etc

Delivery / lifecycle:

• CD pipeline skeleton
• Use Docker tags to document the lifecycle of an image

Employment:

• Software engineering job search
• Software engineering job search: Decision criteria
• Leaving a software engineering job

Front-end development:

• You might not need React
• Tailwind
• The web tooling in the Node ecosystem is closed
• Electron

Game development:

• Godot
• LÖVE

Learning:

• Logistics games can teach you engineering
• Logistics games teach you about tech debt

Programming languages

DSLs:

• External textual DSLs
• List of external textual DSLs

Reliability:

• Glitch-free deployment of static sites
• Production readiness
• Speed can mean latency or throughput

Security:

• Permissions are not hierarchical
• Ambient authority
  • Ambient authority resources
  • Foreign functions and ambient authority
  • The filesystem is global mutable state
  • A globally available filesystem is a security liability
  • A globally available filesystem prevents access tracing
  • Global state in programming languages
  • A programming language with no globals

Specific programming languages:

• Go
• Ruby
• Smalltalk
• What would I change about programming language X?

Spreadsheets and dataflow languages:

• Spreadsheets are fragile
• Spreadsheets are fragile because cells have no names
• Spreadsheets are fragile because they only deal with cells

Style:

• Can functions be too short?
• Use long-form options in scripts
• Common abbreviations in software development

Techniques:

• A microservices architecture is object-orientation with big objects
• A HTTP header to identify calling microservice
• IDs
  • Avoid naughty words in hex digest strings by changing the set of characters
  • Good human-usable tokens are not random strings
  • Proquints

Testing:

• Test coverage is a lie