More seriously, the first piece of advice I’d give a monolith-owner about converting to microservices would be to work very hard to factor their monolith well. Interestingly, across dozens of cases, I’ve never seen that advice taken. There’s always a well-dressed person with excellent powerpoint who is happy to give a compelling case for a […]
The Jump to Microservices Read More »
I use spikes, periods of code-changing activity that end with no pushes, all the time, at small scale and large, as a way to develop my path. It’s a vital technique, and it’s often underplayed, so let’s spend some time with it. What’s are spikes? A spike is a stretch of time I spend mucking
An Intro to Spikes Read More »
Let’s talk about steps and value. Out in the world, folks make a lot of decisions involving these ideas, they reason about them. We want to make sure our reasoning is based on a thorough understanding of the implicit premises. What’s a step? A step is a gap or space, in time and activity, in
Steps, Value, and Change-Harvesting Read More »
I shipped a word processor that formatted the hard drive every 1024 saves. Must have been ’84 or ’85. I was a bright 25-year-old with about five years in the game. I was one of two programmers who wrote & maintained a suite of apps kinda like Office: spreadsheet, wp, database, plotter, such like. We
Lotta inspiration for junior geeks stuff floating around. I’m having a low productivity day today because, well, you know all of that, so I’ll take a minute nd pitch in. Do you know what I did for about twelve elapsed hours of coding time? I solved a problem. Cuz, you know, I got mad skillz,
Juniors And Seniors Read More »
The strategy pattern lets you make "pluggable algorithms", so clients have different behavior without having different code themselves. We often use it to capture the "consequence in code" of some condition, which we can then let other code use without re-testing the condition. Here’s a little java snippet: dimension = horizontal ? width : height
Using the Strategy Pattern Read More »
Another refactoring topic today: dealing with nulls. There are a bunch of techniques, but they amount to a) don’t, and b) do but only one time ever. The basic idea: a null always occurs in a particular context, and in that context, it has a meaning. When we pass it up or down our call-stack,
Dealing with Nulls Read More »
When I can’t test it where it is, I look to move it somewhere else, where I can test it. Today’s notion isn’t so much a single refactoring as it is a strategy that can be achieved in different ways (and different multiple steps). A modern and frequently occurring case: using a cool framework to
Refactoring Strategy: Move It Where You Can Test It Read More »
Another refactoring today: Use the observer pattern to invert an infelicitous dependency. In and of itself, this is a modest refactoring, but its smell often co-presents with others, and unraveling it all can be tricky. (Note: We aren’t remotely done talking about first and second-order refactorings, there are plenty more to go. But I’m not
Refactoring: Invert Dependency With Observer Read More »
Today, another small 2nd-order refactoring. I call it "wrap a Demeter". As with the others, this is a very modest step, but still quite useful in some situations. Demeter violations are places where a client accesses not just an upstream service, but that service’s upstream services, or even that service’s service’s upstream services. It’s a
Refactoring: Demeter-Wrapping Read More »
