On Gatekeeping, Complicity, and Arrival
The Ruby Rogues Years Tell me if you’ve heard this one: four white guys ask a fifth white guy to join their podcast. Being invited to Ruby Rogues in 2011,…
Simple is Complex
I started reading Vehicles, by Valentino Braitenberg. Braitenberg asks us to consider the implications of extremely simple notional machines. For instance, the very first machine has only a single motor…
Don’t throw away invalid data
Recently I saw a wonderful talk about domain modeling in F#, by Scott Wlaschin. Here’s an older version of it. It was a superbly executed presentation, crystal clear and compelling….
Enough With the Service Objects Already
A critique of the emerging advice to encapsulate business domain actions in “Service Objects”.
On being the employee who “needs improvement”
Reading Coraline’s post on a year at Github inspires a lot of feelings: feelings on behalf of a friend; feelings about culture; feelings about how organization structure always wins out over…
Software Entrepreneurs: Stop looking for itches to scratch
On probably half a dozen different occasions some aspiring entrepreneur has asked me: Would you be interested in a hosted solution for selling screencasts? In most cases, the promised solution…
The Pretentious Haskell Phase
Someone drew my attention a “leaving Ruby for Haskell” rant from a few years ago. I thought I’d reprint my reply here.
Some universal code optimization rules
From time to time I have advocated for design approaches which value consistency and ease of change over raw operations per second. I realize that this strategy makes some programmers…
Windows and PHP are snowballs. Respect them.
A young developer newly embedded in the enthusiast programmer community could be forgiven for believing certain truths to be self-evident: that most people use Apple computers. That most websites are…