https://swampcastle.org/ Recent content on Swamp Castle Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Sun, 18 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://swampcastle.org/post/the-least-wrong-thing/ Sun, 18 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://swampcastle.org/post/the-least-wrong-thing/ I recently had a peculiar experience with the Barnes and Noble website. There was a promotional offer, where if you spent $100 or more on an order between December 9th and 10th, you would get to take $25 off a purchase made after December 26th. My wife and I had already planned on making such an order anyway, so we smiled at our good fortune and bought our gifts. That was when it got a bit weird. https://swampcastle.org/post/its-never-finished/ Wed, 07 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://swampcastle.org/post/its-never-finished/ If they’d just give us time to finish it… It’s never finished. Read that again. You’re not writing TeX. You may have a bold vision for how this API will develop, and that’s fantastic. But you still need to deliver on that vision one step at a time, and every iteration needs to be useful and maintainable. “This will be painful in the short term, but it’ll get better when we deliver version 2. https://swampcastle.org/post/nobody-has-time-to-learn-your-api/ Sat, 13 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://swampcastle.org/post/nobody-has-time-to-learn-your-api/ “If they’d just learn how to use it correctly…” If people are shooting themselves in the foot with your API, it’s probably your fault. If your defaults are unsafe for production use, your API is broken. Most of the time, your API is going to give someone access to some small piece of data or functionality, and learning how to use it is a tiny footnote among the hundreds of things that need to be done in order to deliver some product. https://swampcastle.org/2015/11/15/why-i-love-kafkas-design.html Sun, 15 Nov 2015 00:00:00 -0400 https://swampcastle.org/2015/11/15/why-i-love-kafkas-design.html We are taught to revere the interface. As long as you build the right abstractions, we’re told, how you actually store the data is an implementation detail that can be fixed up later. Just make a clean API that has a clear division of responsibilities, and you will be fine. I’ve heard this time and time again, particularly in reference to initial implementations of APIs that worked fine for N=100, but that we intended to “scale up later” to handle a thousand times that (it wasn’t wishful startup thinking — we already had those use cases). https://swampcastle.org/2015/07/28/writing-faster-modulestore-tests.html Tue, 28 Jul 2015 12:00:00 -0400 https://swampcastle.org/2015/07/28/writing-faster-modulestore-tests.html Update: SharedModuleStoreTestCase has evolved since this was written. Please see the docstring for updated usage info. Most developers who have added features to edx-platform are familiar with ModuleStoreTestCase. If your tests exercise anything relating to courseware content (even it’s just creating an empty course), inheriting from this class will ensure that data gets cleaned up properly between individual tests. This is extremely valuable, but can also be wasteful in many situations. https://swampcastle.org/2015/07/21/empathy-and-error-logging.html Tue, 21 Jul 2015 11:27:27 -0400 https://swampcastle.org/2015/07/21/empathy-and-error-logging.html There are good guidelines for error logging out there. They tell you to use timestamps, UUIDs, levels, categories, source line numbers, etc. All of these are great to know, but the most important part is thinking hard about who your audience is, and being able to imagine yourself in their shoes. When you’re writing an error log message, you’re not writing it for yourself. You’re writing it for the poor sap who has to fix things when they break on a Saturday night, four years after you wrote it and two years after you left the company.