Selected Writings
Mostly articles about programming in Python and Go, with occasional detours into the whimsical.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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The Phoenix Project
A summary and a review of the Phoenix Project
Published: 2020-11-29
Tags: Book Club Software Engineering
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From Maybe to Ensure
A digression on naming functions, and ensuring they only do one thing
Published: 2020-11-15
Tags: Programming Naming
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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
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Zero-based ordinals
This is the televenth post of my blog.
Published: 2020-09-20
Tags: Programming Silly
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Standardize the Way You Write Your Range Conditionals
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
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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
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Left of Bang
A review of the book Left of Bang
Published: 2020-09-05
Tags: Reading List Human Behaviour
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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
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Why interfaces in Go are so strict
A closer look at some surprising interface mechanics in Go
Published: 2016-07-11
Tags: Programming Go
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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
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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
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Knowing when to finish and knowing where to start
Announcing the completion of varcaser, and discussing prioritization.
Published: 2015-11-07
Tags: Programming Go
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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
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Inaugural post
This is the first ever post to this blog.
Published: 2015-02-18
Tags: