Programming

Insightful articles and examples to help you become a better software developer

Lessons from 6 software rewrite stories
Specific vs. general: Which is better?
Why do config changes keep coming up in major incidents?
I test in prod
What is your take on checking return values?
Repeat yourself, do more than one thing, and rewrite everything
Scaling in the presence of errors—don’t ignore them
Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend.
A primer on functional architecture
The Value of Values
In space, no one can hear you kernel panic
Observations on Observability
The Passport: A Tool for Better Metrics
Cybernetics Versus Informatics: Understanding the Type Wars
Taming Complexity with Reversibility
SRE as a Lifestyle Choice
A freemium model for scheduling
John Hughes - Testing the Hard Stuff and Staying Sane
Say NO to Venn Diagrams When Explaining JOINs
How Dark deploys code in 50ms
STAMPing on event-stream
Waste – An ever evolving struggle against waste
Boundaries
Lessons Learned while Working on Large-Scale Server Software
Property-Based Testing Basics
Metamorphic Testing
Microservices versus Lean
What programming is like
Our Software Dependency Problem - Russ Cox
The Perils of Semantic Coupling
Faceted Identities
Spectrum of Change
Give Them The Button!
Some Useful Techniques From Bygone Eras
Operable Software
Stability Patterns and Antipatterns, Michael Nygard
Michael Nygard - Grinding the Monolith
Components and Glue
The Fear Cycle
Stuart Halloway - Narcissistic Design
Architecture Without an End State • Michael Nygard
Uncoupling • Michael Nygard
Turning the database inside-out with Apache Samza
Designing an email-only Slack interface
Education of a Programmer
The Yoda of Silicon Valley
Keep Ruby Weird 2018 - Closing Keynote by Avdi Grimm
Maybe Not - Rich Hickey
Stack Overflow: How We Do Monitoring - 2018 Edition
Distributed Systems and the End of the API
Design for security
Post-mortems to the rescue
Lone Star RubyConf 2009 - Something Interesting by Dave Thomas
Indirection Is Not Abstraction
Against software development
Lean Testing or Why Unit Tests are Worse than You Think
Open Source Language Design in Rust and Node.js by Ashley Williams
Sam Aaron - Communicative Programming
Systems at Scale 2018 – Rebuilding the Inbox: The Corporate and Cultural Adventures of Modernizing Yahoo Mail
Documenting Architecture Decisions
The Power of Living Systems
Mike Bostock - Design is a Search Problem
Only One Deliverable Matters
Writing system software: code comments.
Apathy of the Commons
Hammock Driven Development - Rich Hickey
Building a team: Agile!
Good, Cheap, and Fast - PC3
We shouldn't let people get used to the idea that software fails
Unconditional Code - Michael Feathers
Cutting through to what matters
On Engineers and Influence
The power of embedded developers
Exploding Software-Engineering Myths
Observability: the hard parts
How I use Wireshark
UTC is Enough for Everyone, Right?
André Staltz - Open source without maintainers
Ted Nelson -- Computers for Cynics
Agile is Dead • Pragmatic Dave Thomas
Past , Present and Future of JSON API
What keeps Apache Kafka from eating the world?
Hints for writing Unix tools
END-TO-END ARGUMENTS IN SYSTEM DESIGN
Two Perspectives on the End-to-End Principle
The Law of Leaky Abstractions
Joe Armstrong - The Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science
Baron Schwartz - Business Observability Matters Too
Prometheus - A Whirlwind Tour by Cindy Sridharan
The How and Why of Fitting Things Together - Joe Armstrong
From Kafka to ZeroMQ for real-time log aggregation
Type Systems - The Good, Bad and Ugly by Paul Snively and Amanda Laucher
Nathan Sorenson - Domain Specific Type Systems
Look for the duct tape
What makes a good REPL?
Effective Engineer - Notes
Antics, drift, and chaos by Lorin Hochstein
Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry
Let’s talk about usernames
What I learnt from building 3 high traffic web applications on an embedded key value store.
Introduction to Contract Programming
ZeroMQ RFC 42/C4 - Collective Code Construction Contract
Pieter Hintjens - How Conway's Law is eating your job?
How is a Class like a Microservice?
The best software engineering paper you haven't read
Pieter Hintjens - ZMQ, tech, ideas, community, writing and life
Data Driven Products Now!
Choose Boring Technology
What the Four Color Theorem can Teach Us About Writing Software
Pieter Hintjens - Our decentralized future
Greg Young - Developers are strange creatures
Greg Young - Stop Over-Engenering
Ideology
Toward a Functional Programming Analogy for Microservices
Growing Your Tech Stack: When to Say No
Idée Fixe - David Nolen
The Language of the System - Rich Hickey
How do groups work on Linux?
Clojure, Made Simple - Rich Hickey
Safety-Critical Systems - Professor Martyn Thomas
How Can Software Be So Hard? - Professor Martyn Thomas
Just Say No to More End-to-End Tests
Software Is About Storytelling
Smart Endpoints, Dumb Pipes
You Cannot Have Exactly-Once Delivery
Martin Fowler - Event Sourcing
Ashley Williams - A brief history and mishistory of modularity
How do you cut a monolith in half?
Best practices for staging environments
Clojure vs. The Static Typing World
Designing for Reliability
Scaling Unsplash with a small team
Metrics: not the observability droids you're looking for
Monitoring in the time of Cloud Native
Everyone is not Ops
My Philosophy on Alerting
An Introduction to Raft by Diego Ongaro, creator of Raft
Effective Programs - 10 Years of Clojure - Rich Hickey
"Managing Containers at Scale with CoreOS and Kubernetes" by Kelsey Hightower
HTTPS on Stack Overflow
The Million Dollar Engineering Problem
make tutorial
Why Microservices Work For Us
Rebuilding Our Infrastructure with Docker, ECS, and Terraform
Where Is Our “Package Manager for the Cloud?”
Dark corners of Unicode
Testing in production
Greg Young - The art of destroying software
OK Log
Starbucks should really make their APIs public.
Tyler McMullen - Load Balancing is Impossible
Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I’ve automated my job?
Hyperproductive development
What can developers learn from being on call?
The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets
Ten Rules for Open Source Success
Network protocols - For everyone who knows a programming language
Every Server Is A Kind Of Honeypot
Docs, Docs, Docs!
Elixir Should Take Over the World by Jessica Kerr
Lessons From A Lifetime Of Being A Programmer
Joe Armstrong interviews Alan Kay
In Pursuit of Production Minimalism
Linux utils that you might not know
Surviving In Open-Source
Reducing test cases for JavaScript tooling
Good comments explain WHY, not WHAT, and 3 more rules on writing good comments
Understand Go pointers in less than 800 words or your money back
Search the git log from the command line
A Note About Git Commit Messages
Readability Matters More Than Correctness
No feigning surprise
The Silver Bullet Syndrome by Hadi Hariri
Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know
Promoting reliability in web software companies
Git in six hundred words
Three Attitudes that Lead to Maintainable Code
Why Use Make
File crash consistency and filesystems are hard
How many floating-point numbers are in the interval [0,1]?
A Programmer’s Introduction to Unicode
Design Better Data Tables
/usr/bin/time: not the command you think you know
The mythical 10x programmer
Normalization of deviance in software: how broken practices become standard
A case for microservices
A few drawings about Linux
What Does an Idle CPU Do?
15 Fundamental Laws of Software Development
The MIT License, Line by Line
Diving into concurrency: trying out mutexes and atomics
The Twelve-Factor App
Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement
Logging v. instrumentation
Segmenting and refining images with SharpMask
Unix philosophy
Hints for writing Unix tools
How To Become A Hacker
Writing Less Damn Code
It's The Future
Web Design in 4 minutes
Taking The Robots To Design School
Joe Armstrong - Erlang and other stuff
Should you be scared of Unix signals?
Recovering files using /proc
Debug your programs like they're closed source!
What Makes Software Good?
Teaching Robots to Feel: Emoji & Deep Learning
How to Fold a Julia Fractal
Have Software Developers Given Up?
I/O matters.
How I got better at debugging
All I Need To Know To Be A Better Programmer I Learned In Kindergarten
Programming Is a Dead End Job
How the Sunk Cost Fallacy Makes You Act Stupid
My Biggest Regret As A Programmer
I stayed in a hotel with Android lightswitches and it was just as bad as you'd imagine
Man Combines Random People’s Photos Using Neural Networks And The Results Are Amazing
Everything is broken
The worst part about programming
Things I’ve Stopped Saying
You can't parse HTML with RegEx
Why you should understand a little about TCP
Effluents influence affluence : Butterick’s Practical Typography
Why You Should Choose Your Own HTTPS.
Docker Containers on the Desktop
Everything Is Broken
The Humble Programmer
Instagram's Million Dollar Bug
The web accessibility basics
The Website Obesity Crisis
The Making Of 'In Pieces'
Unidirectional User Interface Architectures
'Inside the Wolfram Language' by Stephen Wolfram
'The Mess We're In' by Joe Armstrong
Alan Kay - Power of Simplicity
Five Things Old Programmers Should Remember
A tr Primer
Graphical thinking - optimisation through functional programming
The best icon is a text label
Bash One-Liners Explained - Redirections
The Value of Values - Rich Hickey
What is your most productive shortcut with Vim?
The Story Behind How Pocket Hit 20M Users with 20 People
Fighting spam with Haskell
Web Design : The First 100 Years
Dropdowns Should be the UI of Last Resort
Pure UI
Building SVG Icons with React
You’re Missing the Point of React
You Might Need Flux
Not Just Code Monkeys - Martin Fowler
Rob Pike's 5 Rules of Programming
9 Anti-Patterns Every Programmer Should Be Aware Of
Running A Software Business On 5 Hours A Week
FizzBuzz In Too Much Detail — Tom Dalling
The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers
The Beauty of Code
Process substitution
Reverse Engineering Regular Expressions
What I’ve learned so far about software development
Project managers, ducks, and dogs marking territory
What I Wish I Knew When Starting Out as a Software Developer
On Being A Senior Engineer
Is it really 'Complex'? Or did we just make it 'Complicated'?
Move fast & break nothing
Pipes and Filters
How I got a medal from the Army for writing code
Math For Programmers