Software development

This note is growing overly large, I know — time to rethink the organization of this whole note.

Programming languages

Game development

Libraries and frameworks

Software engineering principles

My actively maintained software (incomplete list, in no particular order):

• Nanoc
• ddenv
• D★Mark
• TomatenMark
• adsf
• ddwww
• Cri

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
• Generative AI
• Coding challenges
• Why can’t I git-push to a remote filesystem?
• Novelty budget
• Writing a CV

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

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:

• The web tooling in the Node ecosystem is closed

Learning:

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

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
  • 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

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