I found a hugely insightful article on naming. It encourages concise naming, and lays out really clear principles on how to name variables well.
“A name has two goals:
After a name has accomplished those goals, any additional characters are dead weight.”
https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2016/06/16/long-names-are-long/
PostgreSQL is a great database. It can do just about anything. But one area that has surprising gaps is case insensitive search. Surely, having the benefit of thirty years of database research, users can search for a customer without knowing the exact capitalization of their name? Turns out it’s not so easy..
Read on to find out how to implement this in EF Core.
Continue readingPostgreSQL major versions are incompatible as to data format stored on disk. There is a pg_upgrade tool available but instructions for Windows aren’t directly usable. Aren Cambre fills this gap with accurate working instructions to use pg_upgrade on Windows.
Recently I had reason to investigate a reported vulnerability in the YUI 2 library. CVE-2022-48197 claimed cross-site scripting in the TreeView component, but provided very little detail. Was this a real security issue?
Continue readingHere’s a puzzle. Does a “wrapped URL” refer to the wrapped result, or the original URL input that was wrapped?
Language is our tool, but occasionally we can get confused or go in circles over semantics. Find the story of this brain-bender, and how we clarified it, here.
Continue readingHey! Want to be able to open JIRA issues or Wiki pages instantly, without needing to open a bookmark before you can search?
Chrome lets you define custom “search engines” to search JIRA/ Wiki, using only a keyword in your URL bar.
Continue readingThis is an often-asked question on the Internet — and one which, previously, had no good answer. Now, thanks to @Jianrong Chen, we have a one-liner configuration to do it!
Continue readingQueues offer a promise of reliability for integrating applications, but can cause more subtle operational risks.
Queues exhibit ‘bi-modal behavior’ — low latency when everything is working well, but can rapidly form large backlogs when a failure occurs. This can dramatically increase the recovery time from outages.
Amazon offer an extremely interesting article about the reliability of queuing, with strategies to limit and manage backlogging.
How often have you found commit messages in your Git history to be uninformative? Or alternatively, wordy rambles that are slow to read — and may well not have the information you need anyway?
Headline + Bullet Points is an approach I’ve found to make Git commit messages informative and fast to write.
Continue readingWith microservices architectures, one key question is where should the boundaries be. Is every entity a separate service? And how fine-grained should service architectural divisions be? We can offer some simple rules of thumb.
Continue reading