Architecture

Abstractions in code are easy to add and challenging to remove. Sometimes we feel stuck with them. But the good news is, you can back out of almost any abstraction with the right mindset. ...

Often, when you work as an engineer on a small team, you don’t have dedicated designers on staff. How can you deliver beautiful, intuitive software without designers? Here’s a trick that helps me: decoupling my design work from my engineering work. ...

A naive implementation is a programming technique that prioritizes imperfect shortcuts for the sake of speed, simplicity, or lack of knowledge. ...

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. ...

Names in software are hard. But what’s worse than a bad name? Sticking with it because you can’t change it. I want us all to be able to effortlessly and fearlessly fix bad names. That’s the topic of this post. ...

When I review code, I sometimes request that refactoring changes be removed. Even when I think the changes are are objective improvements, and even when they support my personal preferences. My reasoning? Refactors are not free. ...

Let’s look at the proxy pattern in Ruby. ...