I recently came across a story that is just as amusing as it is shocking: One of my clients is responsible for several of the world's top 100 pension funds. They had a nightly batch job that ... crashed. No one knew what was wrong at first. This batch job had never, ever crashed before, … Continue reading Preventing Software Rot
Tag: programming
Bayes vs Frequentists – An Empirical Test In Code
You and your friend are walking by a magic store and find a trick coin. You have no clue how biased the coin is, and decide that all possible levels of bias are equally likely. In order to estimate the level of bias, you toss it 14 times and end up with 10 heads. Your … Continue reading Bayes vs Frequentists – An Empirical Test In Code
When Feature Flags Do And Don’t Make Sense
Over the past years, I’ve worked in multiple teams adopting very different strategies when it comes to feature flags. I’ve seen the pros and cons of both, and over time, I found myself disagreeing with any fundamentalist position on their use. There is a lot of nuance to this topic, and I think it is … Continue reading When Feature Flags Do And Don’t Make Sense
Abstractions Are In The Eye Of The Beholder
One of the most common debates I see, is on the right level of abstraction to use when coding. The line between over-engineered and unnecessarily-verbose is a very fuzzy one, and is the source of never-ending debates. Unfortunately, this debate is unlikely to ever get resolved. For one simple reason. There is no universally right … Continue reading Abstractions Are In The Eye Of The Beholder
Alert Fast
A dichotomy I often see in many different teams and projects, is the dilemma between “failing fast” and “failing gracefully.” Here’s a simplified example of what I see far too often, and gets to the core of the dilemma. public String generateGreeting() { try { return “Hello ” + getName(); } catch (Exception e) { … Continue reading Alert Fast
SSH Considered Harmful – Why You Should Be Using Persistent Sessions
No, there hasn't been any new vulnerability found in SSH, nor am I denying the usefulness of SSH as a building block in the dev toolchain. This article is about why you shouldn't be (and how you can avoid) using raw SSH sessions for development work. Here’s a little story. I spent many years working … Continue reading SSH Considered Harmful – Why You Should Be Using Persistent Sessions
Rethinking Software Testing: Perspectives from the world of Hardware
The conventional view of Software Testing The hardware and software worlds may seem poles apart, and in many ways, they indeed are. But there’s a wealth of knowledge that each can learn from the other. Despite the seemingly massive differences in the final product, they share more in common than you might expect. Computer engineers … Continue reading Rethinking Software Testing: Perspectives from the world of Hardware
An Alternative to Dependency Injection Frameworks
I have a confession to make. I hate Dependency Injection (DI) frameworks. My very first job as a Software Engineer involved working with a very complex system that powered a ~100 person hedge fund. We made extensive use of Dependency Injection… but only via Constructor or Setter Injection. We did not use any DI frameworks … Continue reading An Alternative to Dependency Injection Frameworks
Myths Programmers Believe about CPU Caches
As a computer engineer who has spent half a decade working with caches at Intel and Sun, I’ve learnt a thing or two about cache-coherency. This was one of the hardest concepts to learn back in college - but once you've truly understood it, it gives you a great appreciation for system design principles. You … Continue reading Myths Programmers Believe about CPU Caches
Don’t be an Evolutionary Programmer
When you run into a problem, a bug in your code, how do you try to fix it? Do you try to debug the problem, in order to figure out what the root cause is? Do you use tools like debuggers, loggers or code inspections, in order to better understand where and what is causing … Continue reading Don’t be an Evolutionary Programmer
