• Extravaganza
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Selected Writings

Mostly articles about programming in Python and Go, with occasional detours into the whimsical.

• De Morgan's Flaw: Perform This Refactor Carefully
  A pattern that I've noticed often causes bugs
  Published: 2021-03-29
  Tags: Programming Craft Software Software Entomology
• Estimates, Design and the Payoff Line
  How inaccuracies in estimation lead to a systematic undervaluing of the importance of Design
  Published: 2021-01-31
  Tags: Software Engineering
• Names to avoid in Software Engineering
  An incomplete list of poor names for libraries, modules, projects and teams
  Published: 2021-01-24
  Tags: Software Engineering
• Distributed Circuit Breakers at Hipmunk
  How we implemented Circuit Breakers at Hipmunk to automatically deal with third party outages.
  Published: 2021-01-17
  Tags: Software Engineering History Python
• Misapplying LazyRecursiveDefaultDict
  A cautionary tale of how I misapplied the wrong software tool to a problem, and what I've learned from it.
  Published: 2021-01-10
  Tags: Software Engineering Programming Python Craft
• The Sorting Hat and Hash Functions
  Why Harry Potter's Sorting Hat would make a poor choice for a hash function
  Published: 2020-12-06
  Tags: Programming
• The Phoenix Project
  A summary and a review of the Phoenix Project
  Published: 2020-11-29
  Tags: Book Club Software Engineering
• From Maybe to Ensure
  A digression on naming functions, and ensuring they only do one thing
  Published: 2020-11-15
  Tags: Programming Naming
• Highlight selected words in terminal output with grep
  A one-line shell function to visually emphasize search terms in the terminal output of a program
  Published: 2020-11-15
  Tags: Terminal Tricks
• Zero-based ordinals
  This is the televenth post of my blog.
  Published: 2020-09-20
  Tags: Programming Silly
• Always spell your range checks like this
  By always spelling your range conditionals start <= index < capacity, you make your code more easily grokkable and reduce the chance of errors.
  Published: 2020-09-20
  Tags: Programming Craft
• The Empty Case is not Special
  Instead of explicitly handling the empty case in functions, try this instead.
  Published: 2020-09-07
  Tags: Programming Craft Python
• Left of Bang
  A review of the book Left of Bang
  Published: 2020-09-05
  Tags: Reading List Human Behaviour
• Connect Four implemented in 3 lines of Python
  A tiny implementation of Connect 4 on the terminal, with explanation.
  Published: 2017-05-22
  Tags: Programming Python Code Golf
• Why interfaces in Go are so strict
  A closer look at some surprising interface mechanics in Go
  Published: 2016-07-11
  Tags: Programming Go
• Hangman implemented in 3 lines of Python (2)
  Just because you can, doesn't mean you shrdlu.
  Published: 2016-02-06
  Tags: Programming Python Code Golf
• How to remember the order of arguments to super() in Python2
  A handy mnemonic that eliminates the guesswork from picking the order of arguments for super()
  Published: 2016-01-13
  Tags: Programming Python
• Knowing when to finish and knowing where to start
  Announcing the completion of varcaser, and discussing prioritization.
  Published: 2015-11-07
  Tags: Programming Go
• Keysort: The Schwartzian Transform in Go
  This article talks about a problem I encountered while sorting complex types in Go, and the solution I came up with, keysort.
  Published: 2015-08-14
  Tags: Programming Go
• Inaugural post
  This is the first ever post to this blog.
  Published: 2015-02-18
  Tags: