When should we create abstractions instead of duplication?

2020-11-14

Because abstractions aren’t free, sometimes we’re better off duplicating code instead of creating them. If that claim doesn’t make sense to you, read Martin Fowler’s “YAGNI” or Sandi Metz’s “The Wrong Abstraction” or watch Dan Abramov’s “WET Code” talk or Kent C. Dodd’s “AHA Programming” talk. Each of these programmers give advice on when to duplicate code vs. create an abstraction, advice that broadly falls into two camps: either we are advised to follow some rule of thumb or we’re told to ignore rules of thumb, trust our feelings and to only introduce abstractions when it “feels right.…

Programming and Forecasting

2020-10-19

Good programmers are good at forecasting. They can often predict roughly how long it’ll take to accomplish a particular programming task. They can also predict when and to what extent a project will see ROI from a particular technical investment. Unfortunately, this skill isn’t guaranteed to develop as we gain more experience programming. In Superforecasters, the authors note that many experienced people are surprisingly bad at making forecasts and that time and experience often don’t make us any better.…

Why Mobile IDEs Are Bad

2020-09-23

An old coworker of mine (who is still an android dev) asked me a question earlier today: Why has it become acceptable in our industry to have tools that are such poor quality? He was referring to Android Studio, but we could ask the same question about Xcode, which is also bad: Was it really all that unexpected? pic.twitter.com/QU7GPbOhu0 — Code Standards (@codestandards) February 23, 2017 I mean no offense to the teams working on these products.…

Avatar The Last Airbender Language Model and Text Generation

2020-08-15

This week’s TidyTuesday data set is basically the script for all of the Avatar: The Last Airbender episodes. I thought it’d be neat to build a language model from the script and use it to generate new sentences that plausibly sound like they belong in the Avatar universe. In this post, I’ll quickly present some of the sentences generated from the model, and then I’ll dive into how I obtained those results.…

A Tidy Analysis of Astronauts and Their Missions

2020-07-21

Introduction I live in Orlando Florida, which is less than an hour away from Cape Canaveral. As you might imagine, visiting the space center and watching launches is a “thing” we Orlando folks do fairly often. I’ve also been getting into R and data science recently via Garrett Grolemund and Hadley Wickham’s excellent R for Data Science. To apply the things I’m learning, I thought it’d be fun to analyze this week’s Tidy Tuesday astronauts dataset.…

Analyzing Traffic Fatalities by Vehicle Weight and Size with Tidyverse

2020-07-03

I bought a car recently. I’m cheap and practical and I’m going to be a father soon, so the only things I really cared about were: will the car keep my wife and child safe if they’re in an accident will the car keep running reliably how do I get 👆 those two things on the cheap I’ve also been getting into machine learning and data science recently, so I thought it’d be useful to answer them using some data science tools.…

Should we refactor files we're working on?

2020-05-09

When programming, always follow the camping rule: Always leave the code base healthier than when you found it. — Martin Fowler, Refactoring The Boy Scouts of America have a simple rule that we can apply to our profession. Leave the campground cleaner than you found it. — Robert Martin, Clean Code Many of us share the attitude expressed by the above Fowler and Martin quotes. The attitude presumes that code we’re working on now will change again soon, and we’ll reap the benefits of a refactor when that happens.…

Why and How we Should Calculate Expected Utility of Refactorings

2020-04-29

In my experience, most applications are a mess…Changes are commonly made under urgent time pressure, which drives applications towards disorder…Velocity gradually slows, and everyone comes to hate the application, their job, and their life. —Sandi Metz, “The Half-Life of Code” Why Many of us work in codebases that are not easy to work with, codebases that we want to make better. The way that we typically choose what parts of the codebase get made better, however, is sub-optimal.…

My Mid-Career Job-Hunt: A Data Point for Job-Seeking Devs

2020-01-26

I wrapped up my job search recently, and I’m happy to say that I’ll be joining a YC-backed startup called “Heap." I thought I’d share a little bit about my job search in case the information may benefit other job-seeking devs. I’ll go over the pipeline of places I applied to and the result of each application. I’ll also talk about things like salary, resume formatting, coding challenge prep, and interviewing.…

Maybe Don't Inject That

2019-10-03

I’m actually always suspicious when I’m writing up a pattern or a technique if I can’t talk about reasons when you shouldn’t use and trade-offs against it. If I can’t find arguments against it, then I’m worrying that I’m not really analyzing things properly. –Martin Fowler, “Is TDD Dead?", 35:00 DI is useful. It’s great. It makes your code more flexible, testable, etc. Dagger? Also useful. Great. My favorite DI library.…