Andy Clark

‘In this episode of “The Engineering Room” Dave Farley chats with renowned author, speaker and expert software developer Kevlin Henney.’ https://lnkd.in/gsenvBMQ ‘In their wide-ranging discussion they talk about: • Why Kevlin Henney is famous for big public software failures! • Software Engineering, mathematics and the interesting gap between formal programming and sloppy humans. • Architecture, empiricism and three ideas for design. • Coping with incomplete knowledge and making stuff that works in the real world. • Confidence, certainty and loose-coupling. • Learning from actual failure, not just simulation. • Programming is deceptively easy to start, and gets complicated really quickly: Low Code is no exception.’ Continuous Delivery Ltd Bernard McCarty #ContinuousDelivery

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Been doing some actual hands-on coding in the last week plus, and I can't say enough about Claude Dev. It would probably annoy expert coders (too slow and asks for too many approvals) and bewilder non-coders (too fast, makes sweeping changes that you have to approve) but for someone like me who knows what code looks like, wants to understand what the bots are doing (and sometimes redirect them) and can frame good questions about error messages, it is incredible. I've been using Cursor in parallel (including Composer mode) to do bits and pieces of this task, and Claude Dev is really a cut above. And right when I thought it couldn't get better, cached mode showed up and saved me 90% of the API costs lol Check it out, well done Saoud Rizwan: https://lnkd.in/e3NiYkes

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🏎️💨 Making of a Ridiculously Fast™ API client in R. Why my package is **~17x faster** than the community alternatives that call the **exact same API endpoints**. 👇🏽**design choices matter** ✨ https://lnkd.in/ggi_2XyQ

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If you're the kind of person who's excited about all the recent S3 feature announcements (bucket policy unlocks via temporary root sessions, up to millions of buckets per account, pagination and region filtering for ListBuckets, conditional writes, ListCallerAccessGrants API) and you're attending re:Invent, then you should come to our storage track session, STG306 Advanced security patterns on Amazon S3. Learn how to use all the exciting new stuff securely in the most interactive format available at re:Invent!

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I keep hearing the idea that pull requests are bad and that developers shouldn't do them. Well, to me, most of these arguments are somewhat of a straw man variety and they encourage throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Pull requests aren't the problem. Pull requests won't prevent you from doing continuous delivery. The problem is pull requests that take a long time to review and approve. This is the thing that will prevent you from doing continuous delivery. But this is a very avoidable problem. It doesn't have to be this way. In our team, PRs don't normally take long to review and things in the trunk are being updated regularly. So it was in my previous team in my previous place of work. I worked in at least three different teams where we would try to get rid of PRs to see what will happen. In all of those cases, we had to get back to doing PRs because removing them caused more problems that we were trying to solve by removing them. I get it. It may work for some teams that do pair programming all the time, which I see as the only way to keep the code quality up without the PRs. However, this approach will not suit every company and every developer. Many developers I know will find it exhausting having to pair-program all the time. Even when you pair program, PRs still have their use. Just before you push all those commits you created, you can create a PR to view all the challenges to make sure you haven't missed anything. You will not only be able to verify that no temporary code changes go in, but you will also create a nice audit trail of who made the change and who reviewed it. I even sometimes create a PR for my own changes because because it's a tool that makes a pre-push verification very convenient. PRs are just a tool. Just like any other tool, it can either be used or misused. It only causes problems when it's misused and not when it's used properly. This tool may not be useful to you, in which case you may discard it. But you may also find out that it's not as useless as some people say it is and it won't stop you from doing continuous delivery, as these people say.

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Having a ton of fun writing an ORM for V2 of Case Kit. Typescript has such an incredible type system. I have autocompletion for column names, the ability to include relations, relations of relations, etc etc etc... all returning properly typed data (no classes in sight). It's been really satisfying seeing it coming together, and it's been great getting my hands dirty with some (relatively) complex generics. And to head off the obvious question… why aren’t I just using Prisma? Well there’s a couple of things I’m doing differently that I think are marginally better: there’s no code generation involved here, it’s just types (inspired by Drizzle); there’s no Rust binary you need to deploy, and it hews much closer to Postgres behaviour and syntax (the aim here is not to abstract away which database you’re using). But the real blocker to me using Prisma was that its extensions don’t support modifying queries of nested relations - a hard requirement for me due to the way I have multitenancy and soft deletes set up. It’s not shown in the video but the Case Kit ORM lets you write simple middleware that will be applied to every level of a nested query. Perfect for setting timestamps or adding clauses on tenant id or things like that.

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Recently I was reading about the VW data disclosure, and I was thinking: could an LLM spot this? So I built a small prototype using PDL script, and the results are pretty good to be honest! More detailed information here: https://lnkd.in/dqJSMPkU

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SignalR is a truly amazing library in the .NET ecosystem and I don't know of any equivalent technologies in other tech stacks. It makes the process of enabling a persistent two-way connection between the client and the server almost effortless. No longer do you have to do low-level WebSocket programming where you need to disassemble each message into a stream of raw bytes and re-assemble it on the other end. SignalR abstracts away all this low-level implementational complexity. In my last week's newsletter, I described how I've built a system where clusters of IoT devices were coordinated by using SignalR. In today's issue, I will show you how to build your first SignalR-enabled application. https://lnkd.in/eJy5x--T

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Day 3 of Advent of Code, and it's time for some newer Java features: sealed interfaces and pattern-matching. They're a good fit for this use case: pull some tokens representing instructions out of an input stream, and feed them to a simple state machine. As I discuss in the notes, we could have done this in a more classically OOP way (have each token type know how to update the state machine; have the state machine expose the methods the tokens use to update its state, possibly following the Visitor Pattern), but it feels cleaner not to. https://lnkd.in/ekgD-2GS

There were other examples of this around the web, but none explained _how_ automatic reloading worked in Django. Some implementations felt half-baked. I think this one stands apart. This is also my 70th blog post on DEV 😮 https://lnkd.in/gtC6sBMr

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I've been thinking a lot lately about ways of structuring IaC code, specifically - should this code be separate from application's code, or they can (should) be kept close to each other. When writing backend code, my rule of thumb about managing transactions (and other resources, like connections) is that a method or class cannot interfere with its (transaction's) state if that transaction has been started somewhere outside of that code. In simple words, only a piece of code that started a transaction should make a decision to commit or roll it back. Looks like this model can be applied to codifying infrastructure as well. If an application owns the lifecycle of an infrastructure resource, it is okay to put them in one source code repository. Short unpolished writeup on this topic: https://lnkd.in/emzDC9Nn

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Working on a specification for https://lnkd.in/g-pBfAQv. Then I can verify it with tests and https://blprnt.tech/. I'm reminded that wormwood is optimized for readable source code, not UX. There is very little syntax validation.

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New TLA+ blog post. I used this one to learn how multi-version concurrency control works. https://lnkd.in/gBtCyJTE

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I've been thinking a lot lately about how dogmatic software engineering is/has-become/always-was(?). I see so many so-called "best-practices" applied on projects that turn into utter disasters. I think I've got a way of reframing software engineering so we can actually have productive dialogs about what actually matters and what is actually harming our projects. If you are an experienced software engineer or project manager, take a look. I'd really like your thoughts and an open discussion on this topic.

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There’s something for everyone in web development in here:

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The "Scout Rule" is derived from the Boy Scouts' motto: "Leave the campground cleaner than you found it." In the context of software development, it emphasizes the idea of leaving the codebase better than it was before you worked on it. It can be translated as: "Always leave the code cleaner than you found it" Here are some suggestions: - If you notice mistakes in the surrounding code fix them right away - If the class/method is getting bloated, think about refactoring - If you come across outdated comments you should update, delete, or mark them as outdated - Clean up unused methods/variables/classes Over time you can make this a habit, so it becomes easier. https://lnkd.in/dvMdHBFG

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