5,049 karma · joined May 24, 2012
For example, Active Record is on Page 160, and inspired https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord.html. Model View Controller is on page 330 and inspired https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveModel.html, https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView.html, and https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionController.html. Template View is on page 350, and inspired https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Template.html.
Not all patterns used in Rails are so directly named, though. Layer Supertype is on page 475 and is behind the `class Company < ActiveRecord::Base; end` style. Single Table Inheritance is on page 278, and inspired https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/Inheritance.... Repository is on page 322, and inspired https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/FinderMetho.... Value Object is on page 486, and is a key part of https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/Aggregation....
See also: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3375-the-five-programming-boo...
I'm currently reading More Fearless Change by Manns & Rising. I've always enjoyed being a change agent, and I would've been more effective if I'd read this book a decade ago.
Next up, I plan to read Facilitating Software Architecture by Harmel-Law.
Oh, and every day or two I read aloud a chapter of Magic and Meaning Expanded by Burger & Neale to my wife. We're both magicians and big fans of Eugene Burger's work.
For example, the Lexham English Bible:
> I looked again and saw under the sun that the race does not belong to the swift, the battle does not belong to the mighty, food does not belong to the wise, wealth does not belong to the intelligent, and success does not belong to the skillful, for time and chance befalls all of them.
I'd love to read your book, if you write it. Anybody who's talked to a thousand people trying to solve the same problems will have an amazing perspective and a lot to teach.
> A project needs to deliver simple functionality, dominated by data entry and display, with few business rules. Staff is not composed of advanced object modelers.
> [...] Simple projects come with short time lines and modest expectations. Long before the team completes the assigned task, much less demonstrates the exciting possibilities of its approach, the project will have been canceled. [...] And in the end, if they do surmount these challenges, they will have produced a simple system. Rich capabilities were never requested.
> Therefore, when circumstances warrant:
> Put all the business logic into the user interface. Chop the application into small functions and implement them as separate user interfaces, embedding the business rules into them. Use a relational database as a shared repository of the data. Use the most automated UI building and visual programming tools available.
> [...] Yet it is a legitimate pattern in some other contexts. In truth, there are advantages to the SMART UI, and there are situations where it works best—which partially accounts for why it is so common. Considering it here helps us understand why we need to separate application from domain and, importantly, when we might not want to.
> Advantages: Productivity is high and immediate for simple applications; Less capable developers can work this way with little training; Even deficiencies in requirements analysis can be overcome by releasing a prototype to users and then quickly changing the product to fit their requests; Applications are decoupled from each other, so that delivery schedules of small modules can be planned relatively accurately; Expanding the system with additional, simple behavior can be easy; Relational databases work well and provide integration at the data level; 4GL tools work well; When applications are handed off, maintenance programmers will be able to quickly redo portions they can’t figure out, because the effects of the changes should be localized to each particular UI.
> Disadvantages: Integration of applications is difficult except through the database; There is no reuse of behavior and no abstraction of the business problem. Business rules have to be duplicated in each operation to which they apply; Rapid prototyping and iteration reach a natural limit because the lack of abstraction limits refactoring options; Complexity buries you quickly, so the growth path is strictly toward additional simple applications. There is no graceful path to richer behavior.
> [...] Remember, one of the consequences of this pattern is that you can’t migrate to another design approach except by replacing entire applications. [...] Don’t bother hedging your bet. Just using a flexible language doesn’t create a flexible system, but it may well produce an expensive one.
If you live in the U.S. I recommend you read No Sweat of the Brow Copyright: https://www.gutenberg.org/help/no_sweat_copyright.html
This is explained by the ElementaryOS H.I.G.:
> Apps should save their current state when closed so they can be reopened right to where the user left off. Typically, closing and reopening an app should be indistinguishable from the legacy concept of minimizing and unminimizing an app; that is, all elements should be saved including open documents, scroll position, undo history, etc.
> Because of the strong convention of saved state, elementary OS does not expose or optimize for legacy minimize behavior; e.g. there is no minimize button, and the Multitasking View does not distinguish minimized windows.
These are not sapient beings that are capable of looking out for their own well-being. We've bred that out of them over hundreds of human generations.
But there's so much to the linguistics of animal husbandry and dairy that many folks don't know. It goes way deeper than just the milk-oriented terms in the article: Heifer versus cow, freshening and calving, steer versus ox versus bull, AI (not the LLM kind) versus natural service, the barn, parlor, and pasture, and more. Plus plenty of technical knowledge. If you're not hand milking, how many mmHg of negative pressure should you use? Do you use a surcingle, or a claw, or a robot?
Even in the milk-oriented terms, there are others not covered by the article. HTST and UHT aren't the only options, there's also LTLT. Pasteurization can be done in a pipeline, or in a vat. Smaller vats for home and small farm usage can be multi-purpose: I pasteurized milk and cultured yogurt in mine. Some folks even care about the specific proteins (A1 beta-casein versus A2), which is genetically determined by the cow (and can be bred for).
I got a cow in 2020 and there was a lot to learn.
(Source: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...)
Computer Programmers median pay according to BLS: $98,670 per year
(Source: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...)
Software developers typically do the following:
- Analyze users’ needs and then design and develop software to meet those needs Recommend software upgrades for customers’ existing programs and systems Design each piece of an application or system and plan how the pieces will work together
- Create a variety of models and diagrams showing programmers the software code needed for an application
- Ensure that a program continues to function normally through software maintenance and testing
- Document every aspect of an application or system as a reference for future maintenance and upgrades
(Source: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...)
Computer programmers typically do the following:
- Write programs in a variety of computer languages, such as C++ and Java
- Update and expand existing programs
- Test programs for errors and fix the faulty lines of computer code
- Create, modify, and test code or scripts in software that simplifies development
(Source: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...)
Perhaps this will finally force the pendulum to swing back towards continuous integration (the practice now aliased trunk-based development to disambiguate it from the build server). If we're really lucky, it may even swing the pendulum back to favoring working software over comprehensive documentation, but maybe that's hoping too much. :-)
My favorite was Thinking, as it tried to be helpful with a response a bit like the X/Y Problem. Pro was my second favorite: terse, while still explaining why. Fast sounded like it was about to fail, and then did a change-up explaining a legitimate reason I may walk anyways. Pro + Deep Think was a bit sarcastic, actually.
Stateful MVC uses Publisher/Subscriber (or Observer) to keep Views and Controllers up-to-date with changing Models over time, which is irrelevant for stateless MVC over HTTP. Plus, in stateful MVC the View and Controller are often "pluggable," where a given Controller+Model may use a different View for displaying the same data differently (e.g. table vs. pie chart), or a given View+Model may use a different Controller for handling events differently (e.g. mouse+keyboard vs. game controller). Whereas, in stateless MVC over HTTP, the controller is the "owner" of the process, and won't generally be replaced.
And in the world of front-end web, stateful MVC really is mostly dead. MVVM and Component-based architectures (using the Composite pattern) have replaced it. A runtime is usually responsible for wiring up events, rather than individual controllers. Controllers don't need to be swappable because events can be given semantic meaning in components, and Views don't need to be swappable because you can instead render a sub-composite to change how the data is shown.
I don't think these are exclusive. Almost a year ago, I wrote a blog post about this [0]. I spent the time since then both learning better software design and learning to vibe code. I've worked through Domain-Driven Design Distilled, Domain-Driven Design, Implementing Domain-Driven Design, Design Patterns, The Art of Agile Software Development, 2nd Edition, Clean Architecture, Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns, and Tidy First?. I'm a far better software engineer than I was in 2024. I've also vibe coded [1] a whole lot of software [2], some good and some bad [3].
You can choose to grow in both areas.
[0]: https://kerrick.blog/articles/2025/kerricks-wager/
[1]: As defined in Vibe Coding: Building Production-Grade Software With GenAI, Chat, Agents, and Beyond by Gene Kim and Steve Yegge, wherein you still take responsibility for the code you deliver.