Assumptions

As software developers it is our job to test our assumptions. So how do you go about knowing, testing, and rethinking them?

But First, Why?

In my last post, Strategy First, I explored the importance of having principles behind technical strategy. Starting with guiding principles is important, but team members can feel left adrift if they are only left with principles and no specific actions. Will Larson suggests: ...executives are generally directionally correct but specifically

Strategy First

Technical strategy is not about technology choices. It is about the principles we use to guide our technical decisions.

What is Composition in Object Oriented Programming?

🎓I am working in Kotlin for the first time. I'm using Kotlin examples in this post to get used to the syntax. See a mistake? I'm still learning! You can treat the examples here as pseudo-code. Happy to hear about better ways of doing things. Composition

What are you testing when you test performance?

I was working on a project recently that had a set of tests titled "Benchmark Tests." "Oh, nice," I thought, "someone was thinking about performance when they wrote this." Then I ran the tests and realized that they were testing that the web server&

Schema Stitching 101 with GraphQL Tools

GraphQL Tools is a powerful library and has a great handbook to get you started. I wrote a workshop to help people build an understanding of the basics of schema stitching. Follow the README in the workshop below and you'll learn how to merge types, stitch queries across

The Toaster Didn't Trip the Breaker: or, Why the Container Died

Ah, morning tea. My favourite. Plug the kettle in and get it going. Oh! How about some toast to go with that. Plug the toaster in and pop a nice slice of sour dough bread in. My favourite. 💥 Power goes out. What happened? "The toaster flipped the breaker!"

Documenting Source Service in Stitched Schemas

Subschemas in this project often share types, meaning these types need to be merged into the superschema for the gateway. When these types are merged, we have no easy way of knowing which service each field comes from.

Middleware

Middleware is a piece of code that mediates the request and response to the application server.

Ouch! Killing PG Performance with Row-Level Security

Postgres 11 and higher has a feature called Row Security Policies, or Row-Level Security, which is a great feature for restricting access to rows in a tabel on a per-user basis. However, if you’re not careful, you can drag down performance with a bad policy. The post below comes

Code Smell: this.object.knows.too.much

One day in your coding journey you might run into a linting error like this: RSpec/MessageChain: Avoid stubbing using receive_message_chain Uh, oh. What happened here? This is the Ruby community's best effort at enforcing The Law of Demeter. While this linting rule doesn't

Cyclomatic Complexity

Have you ever opened up a file in an older piece of software and seen this? # rubocop:ignore Metrics/CyclomaticComplexity def complex_method(x, y, z) if x > 0 if y > 0 if z > 0 return "All positive" else return "z is not positive&

postgresql

DROP TABLE oh_no CASCADE;

We'll if that's the case, you certainly want to CASCADE your DROP TABLE so you clean up orphaned objects. But then....oh no! You've deleted everything! How does this happen?

big words

Help! My Code Gained Connascence!

What should you do if you think your program has gained connascence? That's right, connascence. Not conscience! What even is connascence? Why should I know about it? Well, lets break this down. Big words are can be murky and a bit challenging to grasp, especially when they'

Un-mess Up with Git reflog!

Have you ever done this thinking "nah, I'm good, I know what I'm doing": git push --force Oh. No. My remote branch is toast. Yep, I've done that before. Usually it happens when I mess up a rebase and accidentally squash away

ruby

Migrating from Standalone Sidekiq to an ActiveJob Adapter

I paired on this problem with my coworker Hannah Yeates. The examples below are from this pairing session. Thanks for working on this together, Hannah! I am working on a project right now that uses Sidekiq without the ActiveJob adapter. This means that our Sidekiq jobs look something like this:

ruby

Weird Method Signatures in Ruby with Keyword Arguments

Kwargs are great for helping developers understand a method signature, but if they're not used carefully they result in confusing error messages.

Making rails routes FAST!

I work in a lot of Rails projects and one of my pet peeves is how long it takes to boot up Rails if all you need to do is view the generated routes with rails routes. A long while back I found/copied/modified this bash function from tlehman,

vscode

Help! VS Code isn't Using the Right Shell!

I recently switched from vim to VS Code because so much of the setup was easier. I still miss some of the simplicity of vim, but in the end VS Code lets me focus more on my work and less on configuration. Unless that configuration is the shell VS code

postgresql

One WEIRD Trick for Speeding Up ORDER BY That You Probably Shouldn't Use

I was digging into a performance issue at work recently and found THE WEIRDEST way of speeding up a query that uses ORDER BY. When testing against our replica database, I was getting results up to 100 times faster than before.