by Bozho | Nov 22, 2014 | Aggregated, Opinions
(Captain Obvious mantle on) You are a software engineer and maybe you have a side project – something that you do at home in your spare time. If you don’t, go ahead and have one – no life outside is better than a few more hours of programming. Unwitty jokes aside, having a side project is indeed a very useful practice (read on). A side-project is sometimes thought of as “the thing that would make you rich and you won’t have to program ever again”. It very rarely is, so we’d better view it as “the thing that would sound cool when I speak about it”. But apart from the motivational/coolness aspect, side-projects have a very important practical consequence – they make you a better programmer. Of course, every extra hour of doing something makes you better at it, but a side-project is even better, because you are the one that makes all the decisions – what to do, how to do it, when to do it, what technologies to use. I’ll focus a bit more on the last point. Not only you can choose the technologies to use, but you can choose technologies that you don’t know yet (imagine going to your manager in the beginning of a project and and asking him to build it with a language or framework that nobody on the team has ever used). And that’s what I’m doing – for most of my side-project I choose technologies that I haven’t used before. I get to learn new frameworks, tools and languages (a.k.a. “technology”), and get relatively good with them. That’s the way...
by Bozho | Nov 13, 2014 | Aggregated, Opinions
What does a developer spend his time on? Writing code, debugging, thinking and communicating with colleagues (that includes meetings). Anything that is beyond these activities is unnecessary overhead (some meetings are also unnecessary, but that’s a different topic). And yet, depending on our language and tools, we have to do a lot more to support the process of writing code. These activities include, but are not limited to: manually format your code – the code has to be beautifully aligned and formatted, but that’s an extra effort. using search and replace instead of refactoring – few languages and tools support good refactoring, and that’s priceless in a big project manually invoking compilation – compile on save gives you immediate feedback; the need to manually run a compiler is adding a whole unnecessary step to your coding process slow compilation – ontop of the previous issue, if your compiler is slow, it’s just a dead time (mandatory xkcd) slow time-to-deploy – if the time from writing the code code to running it is more than a few seconds, then you are wasting enormous amounts of time. E.g. if you need to manually make builds and copy files on a local server. clunky resource navigation – if you can’t go to a given source file in a couple of keystrokes infrastructure problems – you depend on a database, a message queue, possibly some external service. Installing and supporting these components on your development machine can be painful. Recently we spent one day trying to integrate 3 components, some of which had docker instances. And on neither Windows, nor Mac, Docker worked...
by Bozho | Oct 22, 2014 | Aggregated, Opinions
DSLs are a common thing in the programming world nowadays. Many frameworks and tools decide to build a DSL for their…specific things. Builds tools are the primary candidates, but testing frameworks, web frameworks and whatnot also decide to define a DSL. With these DSLs you define build steps, web routing rules, test acceptance criteria, etc. What is the most common thing about all these DSLs? Two things. First, they are predominantly about configuration. Some specific way of configuring something specific to the tool or framework. The second thing is that you copy-paste code. Everytime I’m confronted with some DSL that is meant to help with my programming task, I end up copy-pasting examples or existing code, and then modifying it. Even though I’ve been working with a DSL for 8 months (from time to time), I just don’t remember its syntax. And you may say “yeah, that’s because you use bad DSLs”. Well, then I haven’t seen a good one yet. I’m currently using sbt, spray routing, cucumber for scala, previously I’ve used groovy and grails DSLs, and a few others along the way. But is it bad that you copy-paste existing pieces of code? Not always. You can, of course, base your configuration on existing, working pieces. But there are three issues – duplicate code, autocomplete and exploration. You know copy-pasting is wrong and leads to duplication. Not only that, but you may forget to change or remove something in the pasted code. And if you want to add some property, it would be good to be able to auto-complete it, rather than mistyping or, or forgetting whether...
by Bozho | Oct 6, 2014 | Aggregated, Opinions
The other day I gave a talk on a tech conference about my experience with Scala. Ironically, just two weeks after I wrote that I don’t like Scala, I started working with it on a daily basis, so I now have a better overview. And it’s not all black and white, but many of my arguments still hold. You can check the slides (the talk was not in English). And I’d like to emphasize the final conclusion point: don’t give the users of your language, API or product all the possible options – they will misuse them. The other day I gave a talk on a tech conference about my experience with Scala. Ironically, just two weeks after I wrote that I don’t like Scala, I started working with it on a daily basis, so I now have a better overview. And it’s not all black and white, but many of my arguments still hold. You can check the slides (the talk was not in English). And I’d like to emphasize the final conclusion point: don’t give the users of your language, API or product all the possible options – they will misuse...
by Bozho | Sep 7, 2014 | Aggregated, Opinions
We all know the C-major scale: do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do. But what’s behind it? And how many other scales there are? It’s complicated. Let me do a brief introduction into the theory first, without trying to be precise or complete. In use are more than a dozen scales, and the popular one in the western world are the major, minor (natural, harmonic), and the “old modes”: Dorian, Lydian, Locrian, etc. All these are heptatonic (7-tone) scales. There are also pentatonic (5-tone) scales, and also other scales like Turkish, Indian, Arabic. All of them share a common purpose: to constraint melodies in order to make them sound pleasant. The notes in each scale trigger a different level of consonance with each other, which in turn provides different “feel”. The predominant scales all fall within the so called chromatic scale, which consists of all the 12 note octave on a piano keyboard (counting both white and black keys). How are the scales derived? There are two main aspects: the harmonic series and temperament. The harmonic series (closely related to the concept of an overtone) are derived from the physical behaviour of the musical instruments, and more precisely – oscillation (e.g. of a string). The harmonic (or overtone) series produce ever-increasing pitches, which are then transposed into a single octave (the pitch space between the fundamental frequency and 2 times that frequency). This is roughly how the chromatic scale is obtained. Then there is temperament – although the entirely physical explanation sounds a perfect way to link nature and music, in practice the thus obtained frequencies are not practical to play on musical instruments, and...
by Bozho | Aug 13, 2014 | Aggregated, Developer tips, Opinions
You want to copy the URL of a nice article/video/picture you’ve just opened and send it to friends in skype chats, whatsapp, other messengers or social networks. And you realize the URL looks like this: http://somesite.com/artices/title-of-the-article?utm_campagin=fsafser454fasfdsaffffas&utm_bullshit=543fasdfafd534254543&somethingelse=uselessstuffffsafafafad&utm_source=foobar What are these parameters that pollute the URL? The above example uses some of the Google Analytics parameters (utm*), but other analytics tools use the same approach. And probably other tools as well. How are these parameters useful? They tell Google Analytics (which is run with javascript) details about the current campaign, probably where the user is coming from, and other stuff I and especially users don’t really care about. And that’s ugly. I myself always delete the meaningless parts of the URL, so that in the end people see only “http://somesite.com/artices/title-of-the-article”. But that’s me – a software engineer, who can distinguish the useless parts of the URL. Not many people can, and even fewer are bothered to cut parts of the URL, which results in looong and ugly URLs being pasted around. Why is that bad? website owners have put effort in making their URLs pretty/ With “url pollution” that efforts goes to waste. defeating the purpose of the parameters – when you copy-paste such a url, all the people that open it may be counted as, for example, coming from a specific AdWords campagin. Or from a source that’s actually wrong (because they got the URL in skype, for example, but utm_source is ‘facebook’) lower likelihood of clicking on a hairy url with meaningless stuff in it (at least I find myself more hesitant) If you have a website, what can...
Recent Comments