Home

Recently:

Conventions of safety: Paving cowpaths to avoid sharp edgesー2019-08-18

Thanks to some discussions in my team recently, I've been thinking recently about how design conventions can help or harm safety. …
Quick database change management without external tools: Ad-hoc schema management, but less soー2019-03-31

Most applications use persistent data in some form or another, and because the data itself will change more slowly than the application code, we'll often need to change it's representation over time to match changes in the application. …
Explicit relationships and the principle of least surprise: When simplicity is more complex than you might expectー2019-02-03

Software developers seem to love describing things as “complex” or “simple”, but it's really quite rare to find someone defining these terms. …
Avoiding lost updates in PostgreSQL logs: Ensuring the past holds no nasty surprisesー2018-12-18

One of the several things I'm idly fiddling with is the notion of using events as the primary record for an application. And to do this, you need a commit log implementation of some description. …
Brevity in Failure: When to just die quietly in a corner...ー2018-11-03

I've been writing a fairly significant amount of Go for work recently, and found that it's basically workable. But the limited expressiveness of the language, particularly around error handling, does throw a few roadblocks in the way. …