If a website uses fancy new browser features and works for 98% of the population, that means that it won’t work for ~150 million people. If a website makes a change and that works for 98% of their visitors, they’re basically kicking out 2% of their audience. Can you imagine a venue refusing entry to former clients 2% of the time just because they’ve “improved their experience”?

Don’t avoid writing something down just because you think it’s obvious. The thing you think is obvious now might recede into your subconscious in an hour; get it written down while you can! And don’t avoid writing something down because you think it’s dangerous to say and everyone already knows it. For people new to the area, reading your words can help them feel like they’re not losing their minds. Finally, once you write down the obvious thing, it allows you to go on and draw out the parts that are less obvious, in a way that you couldn’t do if you try to just skip straight to the subtleties.

A thoughtful comparison of Christopher Alexander's ideas (the architect) with software engineering.

I have “A Pattern Language” in paper in my home library, with Flancian annotations! I guess I'll get to it after I finish Fowler's Patterns book.

Stolyarov leaves us no rest.

Platypus is a developer tool that creates native Mac applications from command line scripts such as shell scripts or Python, Perl, Ruby, Tcl, JavaScript and PHP programs. This is done by wrapping the script in a macOS application bundle along with an app binary that runs the script.

A list of approaches to completely avoid when designing software. A bit too extreme, on the impractical side, but manifestos like this inspire thought.

The safest and most reliable way to deal with feature flags is to hardcode them

One of the most controversial things I believe about good software design is that your code should be more flexible than your domain model. This is in direct…

Code is read more than it is written, but it is skimmed more than it is read, so we should write code that is clear at a glance.

I see a positive mention of math notation. The article is probably wrong as hell. Will take a closer look later.

In cooperation with IEEE Computer Society the event is focused on static analysis, program verification, bug detection, and software maintenance.

In Yekatirinburg! Might attend, if exams allow.

Things we wish we didn't know

Thoughts, tools, and libraries I use to make games

1. the number bumps when the lead maintainer says it does.

2. even numbers should be easy upgrades; odd numbers may change things.

Stop falsifying your motivations.

That somehow reminded me how I motivated not using Markdown in my projects

Trimming dependencies. I wish we did that at work

A classic article that makes me wish Go had a proper type system

Лучше без кеша, чем с ним

Music tracker interface inspired a programming paradigm. I don't get the provided programs at all.

Strict guidelines!

PostgREST is a standalone web server that turns your PostgreSQL database directly into a RESTful API. The structural constraints and permissions in the database determine the API endpoints and operations.

Sounds like a way to write less code. I skimmed through the reference, looks cool. PostgREST is written in Haskell for some reason though.

ntfy is a simple HTTP-based pub-sub notification service. It allows you to send notifications to your phone or desktop via scripts from any computer, and/or using a REST API.

curl \
  -d "Backup successful 😀" \
  ntfy.sh/mytopic

Free notifications!

UPD. Used it in my SystemD service files to notify me of service restarts. It was extremely easy to do so. Will use it for now, until I migrate to a proper monitoring system.

This article made me very angry. It's written very misleadingly, it's full of lies. The proposed language offers too much decisions to the config designer (all of the decisions that matter, actually). Nevertheless, there are some ideas I want to mention here:

• Not having primitive types beside strings is good. I'd also keep lists and dictionaries (not the way they made it, but the way it should be). Numbers, dates, booleans, all of this is a mess.

• So, empty config or no config file at all must be a valid configuration.

And it's kinda neat how they find connections between category theory and configuration languages.

What I've learned from ten years working on projects like this

Given that events play such a central role in event-driven architecture, there’s an astonishing lack of agreement on what should be contained in an event. This may be rooted in the fact that, depending on your perspective, events fulfill different purposes.

Isometric games are extremely popular. Let's learn the theory behind isometric projection and how it is used by gamedevs to write isometric-looking games.

As game developers, we can learn a lot from the past. Let's look at the history of game consoles to understand the driving forces that helped shape the modern gamedev technologies we use today.

A self-hostable personal cloud inspired by serverless platforms and cgi-bin.

A deep dive into the text mode editors we had and how they compare to today's

Unexpectedly good.

Идемпотентность — звучит сложно, говорят о ней редко, но это касается всех приложений, использующих API в своей работе. Меня зовут Денис Исаев, и я руковожу одной из бэкенд групп в Яндекс Такси. Сегодня я поделюсь с читателями описанием проблем, которые могут возникнуть, если не учитывать идемпотентность распределенных систем в своем проекте.

Giving write access to your contributors might motivate them to do more. Super cool!

Computers are amazing. So why is software so terrible?

Applying The Blue Angel Criteria To Free Software

The 1OPS principle is the single principle that had the biggest impact in my entire coding career. I gave some hints about it in a previous post, but I was suggested that it might warrant a post on its own to go more in depth.

There is a single advice I would give to anyone writing software, and specially to great devs : Always optimize your code for your most junior developers. I agree that it is not a very popular advice, but it is the one that, in my experience, give the biggest bang for the buck.

Работаем.

Лучше пользоваться несколькими языками, чем только одним.

Стажёром я получал мало, джуном получаю нормально.

any variable named SECONDS will automatically increment every second. Bash is bonkers

TempleOS has images in comments btw.

TLDR: предлагаю рассмотреть хранение исходных кодов программ в некоем бинарном формате вместо голого текста.

Felix on Vala, Zig, C++, Fortran, Ada, Scheme and Common Lisp.

Is this site running Feather Wiki? Seems so.

This article is part of the series Understanding ActivityPub, which takes a look at the ActivityPub protocol through the lens of real-world examples. The protocol exchanges are taken from ActivityPub.Academy, a modified Mastodon instance that shows ActivityPub messages in real time (see the announcement post).

This article is part of the series Understanding ActivityPub, which takes a look at the ActivityPub protocol through the lens of real-world examples. The protocol exchanges are taken from ActivityPub.Academy, a modified Mastodon instance that shows ActivityPub messages in real time (see the announcement post).

In this blog, we go on an interactive journey to understand common queueing strategies for handling HTTP requests.

A bottom-up, animated guide to HTTP load balancing algorithms.