June 5, 2022

Desire Paths

We’ve all seen a desire path. They are footpaths created by erosion from human and animal traffic that communicate a wish for a path that doesn’t exist. When you walk on a paved path toward a destination and notice a shortcut in the earth, that’s a desire path. It’s the way people go, rather than the way we would wish them to go.

June 1, 2022

Think Hard

Ben Kuhn’s ‘Think Real Hard’ shares a problem-solving checklist from the scientist Richard Feynman:

Write down the problem.
Think real hard.
Write down the solution.

On its face, this advice is ridiculous. If only we just sat and thought about the problem, we’d win a Nobel Price like Dr. Feynman!

May 30, 2022

PostgreSQL Polymorphism

Scenario: you need a database record that can belong to one record or another, but not both. Polymorphism and exclusivity. One approach is to create a polymorphic-style association at the data layer. By doing so, you’ll get data integrity built in, rather than trusting it will be enforced by each tenant at the application layer.

May 25, 2022

Goodbye Shared Dotfiles

A lot of people start programming with shared dotfiles, copied from a team or online. I did. Maybe you’re ready to move on; how would you do that?

May 23, 2022

Organizing React Components

You’re creating a React app, and want to organize your components. Or maybe you’re working in a legacy codebase, with many components in one directory, and you want to better organize them. In this post, I’ll document an approach to this problem that has worked for me.

May 18, 2022

On Starting Over

I used to have a bad habit when working alone: I’d start a feature, begin doubting my approach, throw away my work, and start over from scratch. Sometimes more than once. The result? Wasted energy, abandoned code, confusion about what I had and hadn’t implemented, and repetitive rework. This post is a collection of thoughts on this practice.

May 17, 2022

How to Identify the Breaking Commit With Git Bisect

Some code is broken, and you can’t figure out why. Maybe there are a lot of changes to consider, and identifying that breaking change seems impossible. Or, maybe you’re curious about how things generally break in your organization. The tool you need is git-bisect.

May 6, 2022

Be Fast

Great programmers aren’t fast because they’re great. They’re great because they’re fast.

May 6, 2022

Commit Part of a File in Git

You’ve been working on a big set of changes, and haven’t committed to Git yet. Now, you want to commit some, but not all, changes to a file. Let’s look at adding patches.

May 2, 2022

Only One Way Out of a Function

A programming style I try to practice could be described as: “there should be only one way out of a function.” Early returns can often cause more confusion than they’re worth. When possible, I avoid them in favor of a single return.