Software

A classic that deserves perennial review: Things You Should Never Do, Part I

They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make:

They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.

As if source code rusted.

Christophe Pettus’ Software Development blog PostgreSQL When It’s Not Your Job

Useful site with information about using / administering Postgres.

A revist of the 12-factor app after a few years. One persons take.

12 Factor App Revisited

I’ve become convinced that “little languages” — small languages designed to solve very specific problems — are the future of programming, particularly after reading Gabriella Gonzalez’s “The end of history for programming” and watching Alan Kay’s “Programming and Scaling” talk.

Little Languages Are The Future Of Programming

This page is a living collection of summaries, signposts, and advice for these broader points that made my journey with C and other compiled languages easier.

Everything I Wish I Knew When Learning C

This is the foundational Go style guide at Google.

The Go Style Guide and accompanying documents codify the current best approaches for writing readable and idiomatic Go.

Go Style | Styleguide

A useful collection of bit manipulation techniques and hacks.

Bit Twiddling Hacks

Mike Acton’s Expectations Of Professional Software Engineers - Adam Johnson

In a 2019 talk/rant titled “Everyone Watching This Is Fired”, games industry veteran Mike Acton rattled off a sample of 50 things he expects of developers he works with. The title refers to his tongue-in-cheek suggestion that anyone who doesn’t meet all these requirements would be immediately fired.

Although his sense of humour isn’t for everyone, the suggestions are valuable. The list forms a baseline for software engineers to compare themselves against, and it’s not very specific to the games industry.

Adam Johnson make a textual version of the suggestions in the talk, and provided it for reference.

This is a classic; I regularly return to this post for a refresher.

How To Write A Git Commit Message

But a well-cared for log is a beautiful and useful thing. git blame, revert, rebase, log, shortlog and other subcommands come to life. Reviewing others’ commits and pull requests becomes something worth doing, and suddenly can be done independently. Understanding why something happened months or years ago becomes not only possible but efficient.

An oldie, but goodie. This came up in discussion today, and wanted to link it for future reference.

If your project contains multiple packages you may find you have some exported symbols which are intended to be used by other packages in your project, but are not intended to be part of your project’s public API. Although Go has limited visibility modifiers – public, exported, symbols and private, non exported, symbols – internal packages provide a useful mechanism for controlling visibility to parts of your project which would otherwise be considered part of its public versioned API.

Interesting take by Kieran Potts on the ongoing REST discussion.

So, we should not abandon the term REST altogether, but as an adjective for API it just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Even in the context of the ongoing efforts to realise truly RESTful APIs, hypermedia is a better, more expressive classification.

This document is a set of guidelines for using C++ well. The aim of this document is to help people to use modern C++ effectively. By “modern C++” we mean effective use of the ISO C++ standard (currently C++20, but almost all of our recommendations also apply to C++17, C++14 and C++11).

C++ Core Guidelines