Lessons
35 articles · all categories
15 articles from 2022 · show all
October 2022
Why PATCH endpoints matter
A painful lesson from production that brought several engineers almost to tears: *Please* add PATCH endpoints to your public APIs.
September 2022
How better data modeling fixes your code
When your code feels hard, 9 times out of 10, the problem is with your data model. The signs are subtle.
July 2022
A work ritual that keeps me sane
A coworker asked me for tips on how to stay focused during the day. Here's what I said.
Write abstractions, not just code
Wherein I use a silly example to show why you need more than small reusable single purpose functions to write good software.
June 2022
Coding forces you to understand the problem
Programming translates fuzzy understanding into exacting specifications. That’s why it’s hard. The Illusion of Explanatory Depth reigns supreme
A lesson on expertise from a great mafia movie
You cannot make something good until you understand who you're making it for.
May 2022
Writing software is like kicking a can
Writing software is a playful process of exploration and discovery. Like a game of kick the can on a Sunday walk.
The Italian foods theory of bad software design 🍝
Spaghetti code – unstructured Ravioli code – too structured Lasagna code – layered wrong Minestrone software – unclear domains
Learnings about the future of the web from Reactathon
The first in-person conference in years! It was wonderful 🤩 - Remix is great - Serverless at edge is the future - GDPR does not play with 👆
April 2022
The role of a senior+ engineer
"Every product org should have a senior+ engineer whose job it is to run around and make everyone else more productive" 🤔 That IS the role of a senior+ engineer
March 2022
Saving time in UTC doesn't work and offsets aren't enough
Lessons from a painful outage with timezones, UTC offsets, and database clients that took a whole week to resolve.
A quick lesson in writing resilient code
On the backend anything can and will fail. How do you deal with that?
February 2022
Immutability isn't free
Or how we took an API endpoint from 16s to 3s.
How I used indie hacking to sponsor my own greencard
The longest project of my life
January 2022
What to do when bugs are whack-a-mole
What do you do when every bug you fix creates 5 new bugs? You could laugh and move on, or realize it's a sign of bigger issues