All posts by Tom

Long Names are Long

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:

  • It needs to be clear: you need to know what the name refers to.
  • It needs to be precise: you need to know what it does not refer to.

After a name has accomplished those goals, any additional characters are dead weight.”

https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2016/06/16/long-names-are-long/

Avoiding insurmountable queue backlogs

Queues 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.