jpswade

The code should explain what it's doing (self documenting code) and tests should explain why it's doing it.

Comments tend to just become a place for misinformation or get disconnected from the actual logic.

Adding more comments sometimes doesn't clarify the situation, it just acts as a second source of truth.

Burnout is something that is discussed quite a lot, but people talk about it as working so hard that you fatigue.

When we're working on something we enjoy and find interesting, when we have a plan and a goal, we find that we have infinite energy.

Burnout on the other hand is when no matter how much you seem to work, it has no impact. You don't seem to be making any progress. Burnout is the loss of momentum.

“Improved productivity also helps drive better employee work/life balance and reduces burnout“ - The State of DevOps 2019.

According to the DORA research program, avoiding heavyweight change processes and creating an environment of continuous delivery go a long way to reducing burnout.

No, it predicted Dropbox would be dead.

Technical debt implies that it is a technical decision, when mostly it’s a business one.

Debt has a negative connotation, where as it’s more like a mortgage.

I always wonder if there’s an equivalent term in manufacturing.

Alternativeto.net

I had a look into this as part of a research project.

To reduce the burden of writing specific scraping software, I investigated the software listed by the Archive Team[0].

The command line tools and libraries aside (as they would require much more specific tailoring to make them work), I was particularly interested in HTTrack and Warrick.

Warrick[1] is defined as a tool to recover lost websites using various online archives and caches. Warrick[2] requires some expert knowledge in order to get it up and running.

I found Warrick was a bit outdated, so decided to try something similar but more up to date, and came across this (hartator/wayback_machine_downloader).

I found this to be a bit easier to work with as it would allow me to download snapshots within a time period, which is what I needed for this project.

After running it for ~12 hours on my local machine, it still had not completed, downloading only 11768 of 94518 files.

Instead, I found myself writing a Python based tool that could fetch with much more accuracy using the CDX server[3] and filtering by date, targeting only certain fails and allow for multi threading.

In order to improve the process, and narrow down the data of what is needed, I scoped to just July and December timeframes per year, from 2010 to this year, only targeting html files.

For example: http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=%s&matchType=prefi...

Hopefully someone finds this useful.

[0] https://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Software

[1] https://github.com/oduwsdl/warrick

[2] https://code.google.com/archive/p/warrick/wikis/About_Warric...

[3] https://github.com/internetarchive/wayback/tree/master/wayba...

I rarely think tech debt is actually technical debt, that would imply it’s totally down to a technical decision when most of the time we make technical decisions based on real business requirements that were appropriate at that time.

For example, as a business why would you make an application with perfect and ideal code before proving that there’s a market for it. It’s akin premature optimisation.

I also think it’s a poor choice of wording because debt has negative connotations and instead should really be thought of as a business decision, that once the product starts to mature, the mortgage will need to be paid off.

If it was truly a debt, then surely for it to be financially viable there would need to be an equal credit somewhere, however this is never mentioned.

It’s more like picking the right tool for the job at the right scale.

If you want to dig a hole in your garden a normal spade will do just fine, if you want to dig foundations for a building, you might need something a bit more. You can still use a spade or many spades or perhaps you can pay for a digger. It’s a trade off.

So you have a DevOps team?

Who is doing what wrong, according to whom?

The DevOps tool chain has become so complex that it requires specialist roles that create knowledge silos.

The goal of DevOps was to remove those gates and silos. It was meant to be about skills over roles.

All we appear to have done is change the tools and role from that of a SysAdmin to DevOps engineer.

Here we go again.

The view in this article is that DevOps is a role, it was never meant to be this way.

The whole purpose of DevOps was to break down barriers between Dev and Ops, by not creating specialist roles and allowing developers to take ownership of ops, removing the need for the SysAdmin gates.

Instead what this article highlights is that we’ve moved the complexity to specialist tools which require another specialist role.

I would say this suggests you’re solving the wrong problem.

Pretty sure copyright and IP laws don’t overrule innovation.

Not only this but a huge amount of publicly available code is truly terrible and should never really be used other than a point of reference, guidance.

There’s two problems, naming is hard and people think it doesn’t matter, that it’s just semantics or bike shedding when actually it’s probably one of the most important things.

Naming things correctly is as important as well written code itself, it’s all about communication.

I really liked the demonstration of how you can make exception names more explicit.

Join a club or group.

This feels like over-engineering a problem at it's finest. Taking 3 lines of ubiquitous code and abstracting in a new way, when it already does what you need out of the box.

The base url and header details such as api token can all be set in the client in an OOP way already[1]

> What happens if the URL changes?

Cool urls don't change. Use configs.

[1] https://docs.guzzlephp.org/en/stable/quickstart.html

Tests should really fill this gap, not comments.

Back before computer systems, computers were people who did calculations. It’s maths at its core.

Computers today are surely then just applied computer science.

I used to love UltraEdit, it would open huge binary files easily.

The only downside was the price.

Do I miss IRC drama? No I don’t think so.

This is fantastic news.

Todos are generally terrible practice in code, as they often don’t give any indication how they are going to get to done.

They never get prioritised and very rarely does anyone get to do them.

So what’s the point? It feels like a todo is really only there to serve as an excuse for suboptimal solutions.

It’s a good question, but if you care about the audit trail, then perhaps event sourcing is a better choice.

So yes, this only assumes you care about when the on state happened and you don’t care about the history.

I've yet to find a case where using a timestamp over a boolean hasn't been the better option.

This is because turning a boolean on is an event so it'll always have a timestamp.

Sometimes it's useful to know when this event happened.

The only exception I can think of is if for some reason you're trying to save on bytes, which in this day and age, especially true for web applications, this is practically never the case.

This can’t really happen otherwise there will be no children to ask the question.

Walk the board is always better because it focuses the mind on what’s important.

I’ve actually been investigating cPanel alternatives as it’s become expensive and I think customers should have choice.

I find it interesting that I didn’t come across this one in all of my research I did last week or so, even though it’s backed by Redhat.

I actually think although we’re in a time of striving for serverless, there will always be a market for self hosting, be it niche.

Not everyone is building a huge SaaS platform but wants to run more than just a blog or website.

I don’t think this is the answer though. I think what these type of servers need is a standardised layer to interact with them, an API, something like how we have EPP for domains.

Because as we know, frontend will change so fast. The underlying hardware and OS changes too. Now seems like the right time to invent a new level of abstraction.

I’m not aware of anything that exists like this.

Isn’t it mostly just glue?

It’s an interesting theory, I’d question what’s their end game here? What’s the motive?

So that's what Elon meant when he said Dogecoin is the people's crypto...