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Zen of Code Review Series

Tree trunk with mushroomsI stumbled (thanks John!) on this post about the right way to review code. This is a key skill for working in a team and one that is underappreciated. A solid code review makes sure the code changes can be understood.

If code can’t be understood, it can’t be changed. If code can’t be changed, business processes can’t be changed (code is, after all, just business process made digital). If business processes can’t be changed, the organization can’t adapt to new opportunities or threats. Have you ever seen a tree grow around a fence? The fence constrains the tree, but the tree keeps trying its best to work around the fence. Neither end up serving their inner purposes. That’s what I think of when I see code that can’t be changed.

Here is a brief excerpt to give you a flavor of the post.

Your goal, then, is clear: question, probe, analyze, poke, and prod to make sure that you, the reviewer, could support the code presented to you for review. From an overall perspective, there are several questions to keep in mind as you begin your task…

It seems like this is a series, where the author discusses code reviews from a variety of different perspectives. Recommended.

Programming | moore | | Leave a comment

Big hammer or small hammer?

HammerI was talking to a friend the other day about startup vs big company life and he used an analogy so good I’m going to steal it (and expand upon it).

If you think about the problem you are trying to solve as a rock, and the business you are in that is trying to solve as a hammer with which to chisel or otherwise transform said rock, you can choose a brick hammer (which is a small hammer) or a sledge hammer (a large, heavy hammer), or anything in between.

The smaller the hammer, the more effort you have to put into the swing. However, it’s fairly easy to pick up, to manipulate and to re-orient if you decide you need to approach the rock from a different viewpoint.

If you, on the other hand, choose the sledgehammer, then when you swing you are wielding a lot of force. It becomes easier to make progress on your initial approach, but if you need to switch up your emphasis, it’s going to take some time, because of the weight of the hammer.

The larger the business, the more leverage and power you have to attack a single problem. I’ve worked at large companies in the past, and I can tell you the size and scope of problems they were able to work on, often in parallel, were amazing. However, there was a lot of time and effort spent on coordinating those efforts, and and a lot of bureaucracy and red tape if there was a process improvement needed. (There was also dead weight at some of these companies.)

At a smaller company or a startup, as I’ve worked at in the past, I didn’t have the bandwidth to take on multiple large projects. Doing more than one or two major projects was a recipe for distraction and impotence. However, when focusing on one effort, it was easy to try different approaches, work really hard and be super flexible when incorporating feedback from customers and iterating.

There are strengths in both the small and big hammer approaches. The important thing is to choose what is a good fit for both the problem you are trying to solve and your working style (which may change over time).

Business Tips | moore | | Leave a comment

“Do you know anyone with 18 years of React experience?”

I often give referrals to folks looking for help (typically software development, but it could be any other area where I feel I know someone that could help another person or company out). It’s a great way to help out both parties.

However, a referral is not a referral is not a referral. Here are the seven types of referrals I have made.

  1. I have worked with this person/company directly, would do so again, and they’ve solved your problem before. I’d hire them if I could, you should.
  2. I have worked with this person/company directly, would do so again, and believe they can solve your problem. I’d hire them if I could, you should.
  3. I have interacted with this person/company in the real world in a non professional capacity and they seemed like “good people”, and might be able to help with your problem. Probably a good idea to talk to them.
  4. I have interacted with this person/company (online/offline) and they seem to know what they are doing. You may want to put them into your decision matrix.
  5. This person responded to a post I put up somewhere (maybe HN) and I like the fact they read it and responded. It’s worth looking at their resume.
  6. I have seen this person’s/company’s blog post or marketing material. They seem like they’d be worth a look.
  7. I do not know this person but they have been recommended by another person that falls into one of the above categories. May be worth a shot?

Obviously the closer to category one a referral is, the more I feel I can stake my reputation on a successful interaction. Lower down, it is less a referral and more of an informational service.

The important part in all this is being clear at what level you are interacting. You don’t want to hand someone a referral of level two and have them think it is a level five. Or vice versa.

 

Business | moore | | Leave a comment

Using WordPress as a CRUD Database, API Included

Ethernet cordBased on this HN discussion, which I discussed a while back, I looked at how to set up WP as a CRUD database accessible via API.

It wasn’t hard. Steps:

  1. Install WordPress (I used ec2 and the Cloudformation sample template)
  2. Install the following plugins
  3. I also installed the following optional plugins
  4. I created a custom post type of ‘todo’ and added a couple of custom fields.
  5. I was able to get the todos by going to these URLs (apparently you can have the API live at wp-json, but that required some rejiggering of url permalinks).
    • http://host/wordpress/?rest_route=/wp/v2/todo/8
    • http://host/wordpress/?rest_route=/wp/v2/todos

Here’s an example of the output:

{
  "id": 8,
  "date": "2018-03-05T02:38:26",
  "date_gmt": "2018-03-05T02:38:26",
  "guid": {
    "rendered": "http://host/wordpress/?post_type=todo&p=8"
  },
  "modified": "2018-03-05T02:40:01",
  "modified_gmt": "2018-03-05T02:40:01",
  "slug": "auto-draft",
  "status": "publish",
  "type": "todo",
  "link": "http://host/wordpress/todo/auto-draft/",
  "title": {
    "rendered": "Buy Milk"
  },
  "template": "",
  "acf": {
    "": false,
    "due_date": "20180308",
    "description": "please buy milk.",
    "who_owns_it": {
      "ID": "1",
      "user_firstname": "",
      "user_lastname": "",
      "nickname": "mooreds",
      "user_nicename": "mooreds",
      "display_name": "mooreds",
      "user_email": "...",
      "user_url": "",
      "user_registered": "2018-03-05 02:21:36",
      "user_description": "",
      "user_avatar": "..."
    },
    "done": false
  },
  "_links": {
    "self": [
      {
        "href": "http://host/wordpress/wp-json/wp/v2/todo/8"
      }
    ],
    "collection": [
      {
        "href": "http://host/wordpress/wp-json/wp/v2/todo"
      }
    ],
    "about": [
      {
        "href": "http://host/wordpress/wp-json/wp/v2/types/todo"
      }
    ],
    "wp:attachment": [
      {
        "href": "http://host/wordpress/wp-json/wp/v2/media?parent=8"
      }
    ],
    "curies": [
      {
        "name": "wp",
        "href": "https://api.w.org/{rel}",
        "templated": true
      }
    ]
  }
}

The custom post fields are all under the ACF key, and you can see that there was an expansion of the who_owns_it field. If you are going to do this, make sure have the the normal title tag be part of the custom post, otherwise the WP UX for editing the custom posts won’t be much use.

Not perfectly restful, but a super simple way to set up an API that non technical folks can use to create, update or delete records and that you can consume in other systems.

APIs Useful Tools Web Applications | moore |

“Choose boring technology”

Reading a boring bookThis article on choosing boring technology is so good. It’s from 2015 so some of the tech it references is more mature, but the thesis is that the technology underlying a business should be well known and boring to implement. It also discusses how important cohesive technology can be (I love the final footnote).

I think this is an interesting contrast to microservices, which is essentially solving repeatedly for local optimizations and then relying on the API or message boundary to allow scaling. Microservices, in my experience, often get a bit hand wavey when it comes to operationalization (“just put it on Kubernetes, it’ll be fine”).

I have definitely dealt with this in previous companies where I had to put the kibosh on new technologies being introduced (“nope, we’re going to do it in java”). This meant that as a small team we had a standard deployment stack and process and could leverage our logging knowledge and debugging tools.

Here are some arguments I hear for using the latest and greatest technologies:

  • “Our developers will get bored and we’ll have a hard time recruiting”
    • This is a great reason to have regular hackfests and or support developers working on open source or side projects.
  • “New tech will help us do things faster”
    • It’s definitely worth evaluating new technology periodically and adding it to your stack (especially if it is outsourced, a la RDS, or boring, a la memcached). As the original post mentions, if you get substantial benefits from the new technology, then use it full bore and plan for a migration. Don’t end up in a state where you are half in/half out. Also consider tooling and processes to get things done faster–these may have quicker iteration times with lower operational risk.
  • “Choose the right tool for the job”
    • Most turing complete languages can be used for any purpose. And you shouldn’t be optimizing for the right tool for the job, but rather the right tool for the business for the job.

Really, you should just go read the post. It’s good.

 

Business Programming Technology | moore | | Leave a comment

Easily visualizing location data with Google Fusion Tables

Hands with map on itSometimes you have a list of locations in a Google spreadsheet and want to visualize where the locations using a map. Google Fusion tables lets you do just that, for free, with no technical expertise needed.

To do so, you need to create a spreadsheet. I created a spreadsheet of birthplaces of the Presidents of the USA. Here’s the spreadsheet. You want to make sure you have column headers and that your location information is all in one column. You can see that I concatenated birth city and state into one column, because you can only map one column (unless you have lat/lng, in which case you can use those two columns). You also can’t concatenate any columns when the data has been pulled into fusion tables.

Then, create a new google fusion table (under the ‘more’ menu). Choose a spreadsheet as your data source and then past in the spreadsheet link.

Your location column may or may not have been given a data type of location. If not, use the ‘edit’ menu then ‘change columns’ to convert it to a location type.

Add a map using the red plus sign and select your column as the location. Wait for your column to be geocoded (if you have lat/lng you shouldn’t need to do this).

And there you are. Here’s the map I generated. You can see that if you click on the marker you will get information about each president, which is a nice bonus feature. You can also share this within your organization or with the wider world and do additional filtering.

Fusion tables is great when you have the structured data and just need a simple map representation.

Caveats:

  • Once your data is in fusion tables, you are extremely limited on what you can do with it (see the concatenation above, for example). Do whatever data massaging you need in the spreadsheet. This also means that you probably want the spreadsheet to be your source of record.
  • There’s no way to update your data. So when the next president enters office, I will either have to create a whole new fusion table or delete all the rows and re-import.
  • Fusion tables seems to no longer be under active development. At least I haven’t seen many feature changes over the past couple of years. It is out of beta. I think it’s fine to build adhoc tooling on top of this service, but if I were looking for the core of my business I’d avoid this.
Google Apps Useful Tools | moore | | Leave a comment

Passwordsafe, redux

Guy looking menacingly at a computerI have written before about passwordsafe (about a decade ago!). I just wanted to reiterate how having all your authentication information in one or more password safe files is such a lifesaver for transitions. You can easily change all the passwords at one go (using randomly generated strong passwords, of course), though you may have to deploy applications or change environment variables to do this. You also can easily see all the systems and external services that help make your application “go”.

I’ve heard about good things about tools like Lastpass and whatnot, but passwordsafe is open source, can live on a thumb drive, is multi platform and has a small feature set. It’s also extremely easy to set up and get going, especially if you store it in version control. And for a small team moving fast, the perfect solution is the enemy of the good.

Do something–even a shared google doc will get you some of the benefits.

Security Useful Tools | moore | | Leave a comment

HN Job Posting Thread

Person refusing bag of moneyIf you aren’t an avid follower of Hacker News, you might not be aware that once a month there’s a job posting thread on the site. This community has its rough edges, like any other, but this thread offers a great place to reach the audience–software developers, startup aficionados and technologists of all stripes. Here’s the April 2018 job thread.

I find this a bit more credible than the job sites because there’s community policing and because it expires there’s less incentive for recruiters or other bad actors gaming the system. Because it is free and specifies only employees of a company may post, I think that the job openings are more genuine. You often see hiring managers post their contact info, and an email to them is far more likely to get a response than submitting to an applicant tracking system. You can often find salary ranges, and the audience and posts are global. It’s also worth noting that this feeds into some other sites like whoishiring.io.

I have posted on behalf of a few companies for which I worked and have had a decent hit rate. Haven’t seen any real success numbers though.

Whether you are on the market, hiring, or just curious, more data is usually useful, which is why this is always a thread I peruse. If you want to look at previous months postings, you can see them in this bot’s submissions.

Jobs Recruiting | moore |

“Finding your purpose and living a meaningful life”

BatsA friend recently shared a letter from Hunter S. Thompson on finding your purpose. I found it to be quite insightful, especially on how he emphasizes a person should focus on “choos[ing] a path which will let his ABILITIES function at maximum efficiency toward the gratification of his DESIRES.” Choosing a goal is less important than choosing a way of life. I remember when I was chatting with my father about how he chose his career, he stated that in a world of choice you should choose some invariants and evaluate options based on those invariants. They don’t have to be job invariants, though sometimes they are. But if you don’t have a set of fixed standards, you run the risk of chasing after shiny objects again and again, or, worse, contorting yourself to some goal that previous you had settled upon. After some thought during this transition, these are mine:

  • Technology is the most fun and best when it helps people. I remember the joy of this in my first professional software project (mail merging insurance renewal letters). Watching people helped by software I built has been the highlights of my career.
  • No one every wishes they’d worked more on their deathbed. Work to live, don’t live to work.

It’s scary for me to lay out constraints because that means that you are ruling out possibilities. For instance, if a high flying Silicon Valley startup ever read this, they’d probably pass on my application due to my desire to not work 80+ hour weeks for the chance at winning the lottery. But that’s precisely the point. If the opportunity doesn’t meet my invariants, no matter how nice the paycheck or good the perks, it’s not a place that I’ll thrive.

PS Hunter S. Thompson also warns that every person’s advice is drawn from their experience and should be treated as subjecting–as Miles Law states: “where you stand depends a whole lot on where you sit“. Or to use Internet-ese: YMMV.

Lifehack | moore | | Leave a comment