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- Written by: Jason Ross
When people or companies make data available through APIs, it might seem that the simplest thing to do is to just download the data whenever you need it. It’s true that this is simple but it’s also very inefficient, and this inefficiency will only get worse as your system’s demands increase. For big data / cloud/ large scale systems you need a different approach, especially as it might not be just you who pays.
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- Written by: Jason Ross
Sometimes, when you or your team are trying to solve a problem, you find that you’re going round in circles and getting nowhere. There is always a reason why every solution is wrong, or you’re worried that if you start working on one solution it’ll turn out to be a dead end. You get into a cycle of thinking more and more about the details, where everything could go wrong, and then you realize you’re overthinking the whole thing. You ask for more information, and if and when it arrives then it too gets analyzed and you find you’re no closer to an answer than before. The whole process just goes on and on, with no apparent end in sight, and no actual results to show for it.
This is “Analysis Paralysis”.
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- Written by: Jason Ross
In the everyday rush of work and family life it’s easy for personal projects to be neglected. That’s what happened to one of my web sites, which hadn’t been updated since 2010. It had been uploaded to a new web host and just left there, and was showing its age. I decided it was time to update it, and I thought I'd describe the process here.
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- Written by: Jason Ross
Modern systems are fast. Very fast. So why is it that they seem so slow? Controls take too much time to be filled with their contents, web pages take too long to display, documents take ages to retrieve, and applications feel like they have to “think” for a while before they do anything. All running across ridiculously fast networks that somehow seem to run like they’re connected with pieces of damp string. What’s gone wrong?
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- Written by: Jason Ross
Many developers that I’ve worked with seem to have an almost unhealthy obsession with the idea of “Information Radiators”- wall-mounted screens, coloured lights and displays in the office, showing successful or failing builds and deployments as well as general information about the system.
At first this may seem a little dramatic – isn’t it humiliating to have your failures publicized? Why does anyone else but you care whether your build fails? What benefits does this sort of thing give us?
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- Written by: Jason Ross
In Eliminating Failed Deployments – Part 2 – Automate Your Obsession, one of the checks I suggested was:
Ensure all of the binary files have an appropriate version number; “1.0.0.0” is NOT an appropriate version number.
So, WHY isn’t 1.0.0.0, or anything like that, an appropriate version?
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- Written by: Jason Ross
Conway’s Law states:
"Any organization that designs a system...will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure."
It’s often paraphrased as the structure of software developed by an organization reflects the structure of that organization. What if this sort of reflection applies in other areas?
Read more: Programming - Should Your Code Structure Reflect The Data Structure?
