Free O’Reilly eBook: Infrastructure as Code

Development teams for companies worldwide are attempting to build large infrastructure codebases. Download this eBook and learn how to effectively use principles, practices, and patterns pioneered by DevOps teams to manage cloud-age infrastructure.

Reading Code Is a Skill

Reading code is a skill that we can improve with practice. Next time we see code that we don't understand, we shouldn't beat up the author for "not writing readable code". We shouldn't beat ourselves up for being stupid for not understanding it, because we all come with our own unique experiences.

Best practices for REST API design

In this article, we'll look at how to design REST APIs to be easy to understand for anyone consuming them, future-proof, and secure and fast since they serve data to clients that may be confidential.

SVG: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

SVG, short for “scalable vector graphics” is a format for, well, scalable vector graphics. In this article I summarize my opinion of the format, what its problems are and suggest what could be done to improve things.

Plain Text Protocols

If you haven't noticed already I really love plain text so I thought I would find some plain text protocols that are used in different software systems. The Redis Protocol specification states it best by describing its own protocol, but this applies to all of the plain text protocols I will cover.

Stop Nitpicking in Code Reviews

Nitpicking isn’t about code that is wrong but suboptimal. It’s pointing out a variable name that could use a more appropriate word, a conditional that could be formatted more cleanly, or some minor simplifying of logic. Nits don't result in significantly better code, nor do they educate the developer; they are just tiny changes that are, technically, improvements (if not highly meaningful ones).