Code

I program computers. I have done so all of my adult life, and expect to do so as long as I can string concepts together. Like many lifelong programmers, I periodically write up interesting things I’ve developed, collaborated on, or run across.

• A reference to a Future is a Future (sort of).

  If T implements Future, then &mut T also implements Future. You can use this fact to add cancellation safety to a non-cancel-safe future.

• Strategic Forgetting.

  I am, increasingly, of the perspective that when a business pays programmers to automate some part of its business process, they do so because it will be cheaper to do that than to pay someone to remember that process. Sometimes, this process happens by intent, but much more often in my experience, it happens as a confluence of other incentives.

• Small Systems Manfiesto.

  A series of observations on choices that make small systems more successful. Largely a restatement of how complex systems fail, through the lens of success rather than the lens of failure.

• Incident Response.

  Shut down your PagerDuty account, unless someone will die if you don’t answer it.

• Using the shell environment as a project tool.

  A general and less tooling-intensive approach to automating routine project tasks.

• Configuring Browser Apps.

  I’ve found myself in the unexpected situation of having to write a lot of browser apps/single page apps this year. I have some thoughts on configuration.

• Writing Good Commit Messages.

  A style guide.

• A Users, Roles & Privileges Scheme Using Graphs.

  An SQL schema and associated queries for handling permissions when roles can nest arbitrarily.