Web development

April 20, 2021


November 13, 2020


September 4, 2020

  • “I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when looked at in the right way did not become still more complicated.” — Poul Anderson. Also (incorrectly) dubbed Anderson’s Law.

June 23, 2020

  • Software engineering promotions: advice to get to that next level. A nice overview of how to think about promotions. I came across this in my research to define Echo’s principal engineer level.
    “Typically, being promoted up to the senior level is mostly based on gaining skills, demonstrating those, and delivering impact. However, above the senior engineer level, other factors come into play. … For example, your team might be busy shipping small, incremental features, that have little complexity, but decent business value. You almost certainly won’t be promoted beyond the senior level by just doing great work here.”

May 8, 2020


May 1, 2020

  • Chris Zacharias: A conspiracy to kill IE6. I love this story from the history of the browser wars. The post reminds me of the old blog post by Rands on spotting the culture of a company. As a web developer who lived through years and generations of browsers, I do sometimes wonder if I don’t mourn — at least a little — the obsolescence of all my hard-won knowledge of browser hacks and quirks.

March 14, 2020

  • ERP for engineers gives a fascinating overview and history of ERP (enterprise resource planning) and the company that pioneered the industry, SAP. Like the development and adoption of GDS, ERP plays a significant part in the history of computerisation and the field of software engineering.

March 10, 2020


January 13, 2020


December 2, 2019


November 22, 2019

  • You (probably) don’t need Kubernetes.
    You know those old “Hello world according to programmer skill” jokes that start with printf(“hello, world\n”) for a junior programmer and end with some convoluted Java OOP design pattern solution for senior software architect engineer? This is kind of like that.

October 18, 2019

  • Will you survive the Tech Drought? Lucas McGregor suggests the lack of access to software engineers now limits businesses more than the lack of funds, and organisations are wasting this precious resource through mismanagement, “anti-work” (supporting legacy code and tech debt), and confusing agility with strategy.

September 13, 2019


August 14, 2019


June 19, 2019

Best things I heard at Altitude London

The most exciting things I heard about yesterday at Altitude London were QUIC and HTTP/3, BBR, TLS 1.3 and some of the exciting things that you can soon do on the edge with VCL.

Patrick McManus on TLS 1.3: “It includes a performance dessert to make the security vegetables go down better.”

Moving TLS negotiation to the edge is in itself a performance improvement.

Ilya

May 23, 2019


April 1, 2019

  • “Time management” is not a solution — it’s actually part of the problem.
    Being prolific is not about time management. There are a limited number of hours in the day, and focusing on time management just makes us more aware of how many of those hours we waste. A better option is attention management: Prioritize the people and projects that matter, and it won’t matter how long anything takes.
    This reminds me of agreeing to a fixed scope: all emphasis is placed on delivering a set number of features irrespective of their value or quality. In fact, in this situation, the only thing that can give is quality.

March 28, 2019

  • Wilfred Hughes: The siren song of little languages. “Sometimes a usable language struggles simply because it’s too much fun to write your own. Developers end up building their own implementation rather than actually using the language.”

March 25, 2019

  • We can teach women to code, but that just creates another problem.
    The computing historian Marie Hicks can’t stand it when people tout coding camps as a solution to technology’s gender problem. “I think these initiatives are well-meaning, but they totally misunderstand the problem. The pipeline is not the problem; the meritocracy is the problem. The idea that we’ll just stuff people into the pipeline assumes a meritocracy that does not exist.”

March 14, 2019


March 13, 2019


March 6, 2019

  • Mozilla releases Common Voices, the largest to-date public domain transcribed voice dataset.

February 21, 2019

How to build product/market fit

How Superhuman built an engine to find product/market fit. Ask your early users: “how would you feel if you could no longer use the product?” Focus on the “very disappointed” group. These are your biggest proponents, they will tell you why your product is important.

This reminds me of finding a beachhead from Crossing the Chasm.

I also really liked this piece of advice:

Our next step was somewhat counterintuitive: we decided to politely pass over the feedback from users who would not be disappointed if they could no longer use the product.

This batch of not disappointed users should not impact your product strategy in any way. They’ll request distracting features, present ill-fitting use cases and probably be very vocal, all before they churn out and leave you with a mangled, muddled roadmap. As surprising or painful as it may seem, don’t act on their feedback — it will lead you astray on your quest for product/market fit.

Ilya

February 8, 2019


January 31, 2019

  • Don’t say “homoiconic”. “When asked what’s so great about Lisp, many aficionados will say that the language is Homoiconic and that this property gives it certain magical advantages over other languages. When asked what homoiconic means, however, the answer is often much less clear.”

January 28, 2019


January 22, 2019


January 21, 2019


January 20, 2019


January 7, 2019


January 2, 2019


November 22, 2018


September 29, 2018


August 14, 2018


August 6, 2018


April 29, 2018

  • Learning CSS grid layout with the Swiss. A very nice introduction to CSS Grid and how you can combine it with Flexbox and CSS Columns. I love how the examples recreate the layouts from contemporary print magazines to Bauhaus posters to Wolfgang Weingart’s New Wave work.

March 10, 2018


February 21, 2018


December 7, 2017


November 27, 2017

  • Don’t release the Zalgo! A zalgo is a function that is not predictable, for example returning synchronously in some cases but asynchronously in others.

November 1, 2017

A highly subjective guide to prototyping tools

Nine prototyping tools compared. Because none are perfect but choosing the right one matters.

Ilya

October 19, 2017


October 16, 2017

  • Ask HN: What do you care about the most in a tech job post? Interesting points mentioned: salary, obviously. Being able to see a picture of the working environment or “your future desk”. How many meetings there typically are. What would the split between architecture and coding be. How long the working week is. Some suggested to make the application process as little effort as possible. But this is problematic from the hiring side, as a considerate commenter pointed out.

September 21, 2017

  • AtF Spark, a font to render sparklines with only text.

June 13, 2017

  • How AI is streamlining marketing and sales. More interestingly, bots can elicit information: “I’ve learned things about my visitors that no other analytics system would show,” said Wentworth. “We’ve learned about new use cases, and we’ve learned about product problems.”

June 11, 2017

  • How Etsy ships apps. The engineers wanting to have their code shipped join a push train. “This strategy has been successful for a lot of reasons, but especially because each deploy is handled by the people most familiar with the changes that are shipping. Those that wrote the code are in the best position to recognize it breaking, and then fix it. Because of that, developers should be empowered to deploy code as needed, and remain close to its rollout.” But it doesn’t work for apps.
  • Increment is a new magazine dedicated to covering how teams build and operate software systems at scale. The inaugural issue focuses on industry best practices around on-call and incident response. Looks interesting and has gorgeous artwork by Mark Conlan.
  • Things to use instead of JWT. Kevin Burke: “In general, specifications that allow the attacker to choose the algorithm for negotiation have more problems than ones that don’t (see TLS).” Burke helpfully covers four use cases.

May 28, 2017

What happens to older programmers? and other questions on Quora

Quora: What happens to older programmers? Some become managers, many keep coding, the answers are pretty good. Keep in mind that there’s hardly been many old programmers yet.

As an aside, I find Quora questions fascinating. The questions run from the practical to the existential (what’s the point of life?) to the polemic (don’t good programmers use ‘else’?; will PHP die out in 2017?).

There’s something both startling and amusing when someone asks: what are the best gems to be used with Ruby on Rails for a dating / social network website? — and receives candid answers! I appreciate the specificity, but that’s baldly a bold ask.

I suppose what’s most fascinating is what the questions say about us.

Ilya