PD#595 It's hard to write code for computers

It's hard to write code for computers, but it's even harder to write code for humans
10 minutes by Erik Bernhardsson

This article discusses the challenges of writing code for humans, focusing on creating user-friendly frameworks, libraries, and APIs. It emphasizes the importance of easy onboarding, learning through examples, and reducing conceptual complexity while maintaining functionality. The author provides tips for improving developer experiences, such as making tools programmable, being cautious with defaults and syntactic sugar, and ensuring clear error messages to guide users toward success.

The good, the bad, the ugly of externalized authorization
sponsored by Cerbos

Authorization is the backbone of any secure application. Externalized authorization offers even more, providing scalability, cleaner code and flexibility to evolving roles & permissions, separating AuthZ logic from your app. But it also brings new headaches, like performance hits and complex integration — unless you know how to overcome them and make externalized authorization actually work for you.

Ideas from "A Philosophy of Software Design"
11 minutes by Eliran Turgeman

The author shares insights from "A Philosophy of Software Design" by John Ousterhout, focusing on three key ideas: adopting a zero-tolerance approach to complexity, recognizing that smaller components aren't always better for modularity, and understanding that exception handling can significantly increase complexity.

Terminal colours are tricky
15 minutes by Julia Evans

My one big takeaway from this was to turn on “minimum contrast” in my terminal, I think it’s going to fix most of the occasional accidental unreadable text issues I run into and I’m pretty excited about it.

How Talking Over A Wall Changed My Direction As A Programmer
4 minutes by Andrew Wulf

In 1983, a programmer at a defense contractor was unexpectedly tasked with creating a VT-100 terminal emulator for an Apple II in just one week, despite having limited experience with the required technologies.

Improving Application Availability: Redundancy and Persistence
10 minutes by Mario Bittencourt

This article discusses key concepts in application availability, focusing on redundancy and persistence. It explains how redundancy can be achieved through multiple instances of resources and load balancing, and highlights the challenges of maintaining consistent behaviour across replicas.

The next era of customer engagement is here 🤯 - Twilio Segment CDP Week 2024 - Virtual
sponsored by Twilio

At Segment's CDP Week, we’re bringing together experts to share their experiences from the frontlines to show you how it’s never been easier to deliver personalized engagement within the AI era. Join us for our 4th annual virtual CDP Week to hear insights from industry leaders at Fidelity, IBM, Google Cloud, and more on how they are making every customer interaction personal. Register free here.

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