Programming

Notes
In software engineering there are two things you are trying to get right:
Software Validation - Did we build the right thing?
Software Verification - Did we build the thing right?
Software simplicity is a prerequisite to reliability.
A small, simple API is usually also a hallmark of a well-understood problem.
Run/Right/Fast.
Make the code work I write is working. Then I can make it fast (if necessary). Solving the “correct/clean/performant code” problem all at once can be overwhelming. Don’t be overwhelmed. Solve one at a time.
Reducing the maintenance burden is, for most codebases, the biggest optimization I can do.
Of course it's all about striking a balance, but 99% of the time there is a choice between performance and readability, readability is the right answer. Performance should only be chosen if it is absolutely necessary.
If I write ugly code, anyone who intends to fix a bug or add a feature will not enjoy his work and likely avoid it next time.
Explicit over implicit is almost always better.
​One of my principles is to always strive for simplicity when creating. In retrospect, I've learned many thing that I previously thought too complex to understand. The complexities tend to dissolve when you realize they are mostly just extra distractions emerging from the pressures of engineering the thing... distractions that you probably find yourself inventing all over again once you've assimilated the core idea.​
Readme driven development is pretty neat. Write the README first as a specification. Then write the code for it. Zeit do it often.
We are about to study the idea of a computational process. Computational processes are abstract beings that inhabit computers. As they evolve, processes manipulate other abstract things called data. The evolution of a process is directed by a pattern of rules called a program. People create programs to direct processes.
Always be looking for patterns. Abstract them always and only when it simplifies.
Persevere in getting an abstraction just right. When you find it, everything will magically fall into place.
The implementation is the design.
Hide whatever the caller shouldn't care about. In particular, you can remove type parameters with appropriate quantification.
Declarative configuration means that you write down the desired state of the world in a configuration and then submit that configuration to a service that takes actions to ensure the desired state becomes the actual state.
Every single feature makes product more complex, makes testing more complex, puts constraints on UI design etc. Controlling feature creep (also by revisiting old features) is very important to keep project healthy. Larger the project, more important it is.
​“Simplicity” often just means that a concept fits cleanly in the maker’s head at a particular point in time. How many times have I returned to a project I thought was simple only to find I had burdened it with spooky magic because I didn’t benefit from critical distance at the time? When was the last time I deemed another person’s work “too complex” because I couldn’t understand it in one sitting and wasn’t aware of the constraints they were operating under? Answers: too often and too recently.​
If we take a look at any given line of code in a method, we can nearly always categorize it as serving one of the following roles: 1. Collecting input. 2. Performing work. 3. Delivering output. 4. Handling failures.
​Code duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction. When the abstraction is wrong, the fastest way forward is back.​
​Senior skills: Understanding requirements and knowing when to clarify. Building what's actually needed. Working with others including leadership. Working with customers when needed. Attention to detail. Knowing when to challenge others. Ownership. Innovation. Adaptability to change.​
​Write the comments first, then fill in the code.​
​If your variable names are good enough you need way fewer comments​
​The mindset that has helped me to improve my skills is that you should always just roll up your sleeves and look at the running process and its code rather than wasting more than 5 minutes searching for help or pouring over documentation that’s out of date and never correct. Put a short time cap on the time you spend doing that, and then just put on your explorer hat and pull out your scary toolkit to hunt that thing down.​
​Practices you can follow to get 10x results with programming​
Understand the business reasoning behind the project…look for ways of exploiting that knowledge to minimize the amount of work done.
Less code is always easier to debug…or if you can’t debug, throw out and replace.
Clearly defined project goals and constraints and milestones make development fast and visible.
Throwaway prototypes are faster than big projects and teach you more–and may be good enough for the business.
Understanding, deeply, the tools you use and the basic principles of computer science and engineering help you prune solution spaces a lot better.
Identify whether or not the framework/third-party app is actually delivering value over just implementing a smaller bespoke solution yourself. Color picker? Almost certainly. Database extension? Probably. Container orchestration for a static blog? Probably not.
Pseudocode and stepwise refinement of the solution to a problem. If you can’t explain something with bullet points, you don’t understand it, and if you don’t understand it, you’re slow.
​Code style comments are tiny cuts to someone's confidence and you should weigh that vs the value of the "fixing" it..​
​My measure of codebase quality these days is almost entirely "how easy is it to change". So readability is key, and also making sure that changes have to touch as few places in the code as possible.​
​1. You're not clever. 2. Distributed systems rule #1: Do not distribute the system! 3. Do not micro optimize. 4. Measure where your program spends time. 5. Optimization rule #1: Reduce I/O. 6. Should I use a distributed cache? No!​
​Top 3 motivation killers for developers: Slow environments to test. Micromanagement. Continuous legacy projects.​
​Software should be: Robust. Reliable. Stable. Simple.​
Read, analyze and write lots of code. Don't be too concerned with the latest fads.
​When I update dependencies, I generally try to check each update to see what has changed. This is where using a lot of dependencies becomes expensive, because it takes more work to update them. I don’t really see this process bring automated, unless a web-of-trust like thing got popular. But I’m not holding my breath.​
​99% of what I do in a large codebase is find pre-existing examples, copy-paste structure, fill in the holes and clean up. That's it.​
​Don't comment bad code. Rewrite it.​
​Universal property of software is that it evolves. And since human beings (us, developers) make it evolve, we need to make sure that making evolve will be as easy as possible, and as little error-prone as possible of course.​
​The developers who seem to have all the answers? They aren’t smarter than you. They’ve just seen that before.​
​Why do programmers reach for step-based debugging when tracing (print-based debugging) is generally more useful?​
​Computers, networking, etc are just an agreed upon spec of which bytes in which location result in which action.​
​Mutation at a microscopic level is totally okay. What matters most is avoiding mutation at the macroscopic level, like when the app architecture has many important modules mutating or monkey patching each other.​
​My general rule is that mutating off screen is dangerous, not necessarily bad but a red flag. I’ve found if you have to scroll up/down or change file to find a reference to some variable then there is almost certainly an increased chance of fuckery.​
​An anti-pattern is just a pattern used in a sub-optmial context. A good practice is just a practice used in the right context. You shouldn't talk about patterns and practice being "good" or "bad" without talking about the context in which they will be used.​
​“Change only one thing at a time” should be codified into every software change control process. There should be no implicit changes, ever. Every single bit of config needs to be captured as code.​
​Code affects humans, not machines. Think through the consequences of design decisions. Tradeoffs are everywhere, document them. Taking on technical debt should be an informed decision, not the default. All resources are finite. Know your complexity bounds and impossibility results.​
​We should have "code walkthrough" meetings, where someone who knows an aspect of the codebase explains how it works to everyone else. No PRs reviewed, no decisions made, just knowledge transfer.​
​You should own your core competencies.​
​If you write software that shows errors to users (so, software) please, do everyone including yourself a favor and keep some way of figuring out the causal chain that drove a certain decision by your program.​
​Don’t build software systems “to last”: we humans are terrible at predicting what changes we’ll need to make in the future. Instead, develop expertise at replacing systems. You know for sure you’ll need to replace it, so replace often, you’ll get better at it!​
Links
​One Bite At A Time: Partitioning Complexity​
​Being A Developer After 40​
​What's code?​
​Portability matters​
​On being an effective developer​
​Advice to the newish programmer​
​Comment Your Code​
​Things You Should Never Do​
​Writing good bug reports​
​Tips for reading new codebases​
​Engineering Principles at Monzo​
​Awesome Cold Showers - For when people get too hyped up about things. (HN)
​Fish Design Principles​
​List of resources about programming practices for writing safety-critical software​
​In Pursuit of Production Minimalism​
​Mostly avoid unit tests​
​Software disenchantment​
​In search of software perfection - Xavier Leroy (2016)​
​Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) (1978) (PDF)
​Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work? (2018)​
​HN: Please do not attempt to simplify this code (2018)​
​HN: Minimalism: Practical Guide to Writing Less Code (2018)​
​Software Engineering at Google Paper (2017) (HN)
​Software Engineering at Google Book (2020) (Summary)
​Professional Programming - Collection of full-stack resources for programmers.
​Ask HN: What are must-know concepts for back end development? (2019)​
​HN: Advice to new programmers (2019)​
​Shipping code at N26 (2019)​
​Junior and senior engineers (2015)​
​Ask HN: How to be productive with big existing code base (2019)​
​On Simplicity (2019)​
​Programming Dictionary (Russian)​
​HowProgrammingWorks courses (Russian)​
​Keep a changelog (Code)
​Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998) (HN)
​Rich Hickey on becoming a better developer​
​Why programming is difficult​
​Abstractions (2019)​
​Categorized overview of Programming Principles & Patterns​
​Too DRY - The Grep Test (2013)​
​Awesome Roadmaps - Curated list of awesome software development roadmaps.
​Awesome EventStorming​
​7 absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer (2019) (HN) (Lobsters)
​Every Programmer Should Know​
​Risk-First development book​
​Visual Programming Codex - Resources and references for the past and future of visual programming.
​Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer (2019) (HN)
​Writing system software: code comments​
​Ask HN: How do you handle logging? (2019)​
​Google Engineering Practices Documentation (Code)
​How to do a code review (HN)
​Ask HN: What Have You Learned at Google as a Software Engineer? (2019)​
​Software Foundations series - Broad introduction to the mathematical underpinnings of reliable software.
​Software optimization resources​
​Simple Made Easy by Rich Hickey (2011)​
​"Performance Matters" by Emery Berger (2019)​
​Exercises in Programming Style - Comprehensive collection of programming styles using a simple computational task, term frequency.
​Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read? (2019)​
​Software Engineering for Industry​
​Execute program - Programming lessons.
​Cheng Lou - Taming the Meta Language - React Conf 2017​
​Programming Across Paradigms • Anjana Vakil (2017)​
​TBA: Developer experience stuff? by Ashley Williams (2019)​
​Best Practices Checklist - List of awesome idiomatic code resources. Rust, Go, Erlang, Ruby, Pony and more.
​Programming book list​
​Programming Talks​
​There's No Such Thing as Knowing Your Computer 'All the Way to the Bottom' (2019) (Lobsters)
​Building awesome developer tools - Ines Montani (2019)​
​Minimal Viable Programs​
​Minimalism in Programming (2018)​
​ReactiveConf 2019 - David Nolen: Are we there yet? Remix​
​Sourcetrail - Free and open-source cross-platform source explorer. (HN)
​Developer Roadmaps - Community driven roadmaps, articles and resources for developers. (HN) (Code)
​Inversion of Control (2019)​
​On porting code (2019)​
​Challenging projects every programmer should try (2019) (HN)
​You don't need loops - Avoid The One-off Problem, Infinite Loops, Statefulness and Hidden intent.
​Bret Victor - The Future of Programming (2013)​
​Ask HN: What do top engineers you know do that others don't? (2019)​
​If you're goal is to learn how to code in 2020, here's a thread of advice for you​
​Curated Programming Resources​
​Goodbye, Clean Code (2020) (HN) (Lobsters)
​The Wrong Abstraction (2016) (HN)
​Returning to First Principles (2020)​
​On Composition (2019) - Our composition models are poor and don't scale well (HN).
​Simplicity isn't simple (2015) (Lobsters)
​End-user programming (2019)​
​Slow Software (2018)​
​Noweb - Simple, Extensible Tool for Literate Programming. (Code) (HN)
​verso - New approach to literate programming.
​Program Repair - Community-driven effort to facilitate discovery, access and systematization of data related to automated program repair research.
​Literate Programming notes​
​TU Delft Software Engineering Research Group (SERG)​
​Ask HN: What change in your programming technique has been most transformative? (2020)​
​Curated list of awesome DIY software​
​How Big Technical Changes Happen at Slack (2020) (HN)
​Lobsters: What's the best GUI library around? (2020)​
​Genetic programming is waiting for better tools - Rakhim Davletkaliyev (2019)​
​Computers can be understood (2020)​
​Notes on structured programming - Edsger Dijkstra (1970)​
​Floating Point Visually Explained (2017)​
​What makes a dependency dependable?​
​Defunctionalisation – an underappreciated tool for writing good software (2020) (HN)
​Ultimate Coding Resources List​
​libs.garden​
​Advice on things to learn for junior dev (2020)​
​How I became a better programmer (2017) (HN)
​Ask HN: How to improve code quality while maintaining decent velocity? (2020)​
​New Grad vs. Senior Dev (HN)
​Things I’ve learned in 20 years of programming  (HN)
​Design Patters for Humans - Ultra-simplified explanation to design patterns.
​Sad state of cross platform GUI frameworks (2020) (Lobsters)
​Lobsters: The happy state of (2020)​
​Worse Is Better​
​Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming? (2020)​
​Malleable Systems: Software must be as easy to change as it is to use it (HN)
​Learn With Jason - Live show streamed where Jason pair programs for 90 min to learn something new.
​How to Design Programs - Introduction to programming and computing. (Book) (Code)
​JetBrains Academy - Learn to Program by Creating Working Applications.
​Engineering code quality in the Firefox browser: A look at our tools and challenges (2020) (HN)
​Effective Engineer - Notes (HN)
​Complexity Has to Live Somewhere (2020) (Lobsters) (HN)
​Software Folklore – A collection of weird bug stories (HN)
​Floating Point Visually Explained (2017) (HN)
​Ask HN: Do you ever go back and admire a piece of code you wrote? (2020)​
​Write Libraries, Not Frameworks (2020) (HN) (Reddit)
​Feedback Ladders: How We Encode Code Reviews at Netlify (2020)​
​The find-and-replace Odyssey, a programmer's guide (2020)​
​Migrations: the sole scalable fix to tech debt (2018)​
​Lobsters: What non-electron cross-platform GUI toolkit do you enjoy using? (2020)​
​What Color is Your Function? (2015) (HN)
​So, what does it mean to be a senior developer? (2020)​
​The Wet Codebase by Dan Abramov (2019)​
​Ask HN: Why isn’t visual programming a bigger thing? (2020)​
​The Unreasonable Effectiveness Of Declarative Programming (2020) (HN)
​7GUIs - GUI Programming Benchmark. (HN)
​Lower Your Guards: A Compositional Pattern-Match Coverage Checker​
​Software Engineering Within SpaceX (2020) (HN)
​Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high? (2020)​
​Literate - Literate programming tool for any language. (Web) (Lobsters)
​Ask HN: What is the ideal developer experience in 2020?​
​Lobsters: What's the ideal developer experience in 2020?​
​Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know (Code) (HN)
​Annotated Debugger Implementation Bibliography (Code)
​Conversational software development (2020)​
​Choose Boring Technology (2015) (HN) (HN 2)
​Software Design for Flexibility by Chris Hanson, Gerald Jay Sussman (2020)​
​MIT 6.001 Structure and Interpretation (1986) (HN)
​If you can't delete code then you're stuck with it​
​Dynamic linking (2020) (Lobsters) (HN)
​It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code (2020) (Reddit) (Lobsters) (HN)
​Software reuse is more like an organ transplant than snapping Lego blocks (2011) (HN)
​Programming Questions Quiz​
​Ways to explain code when told it doesn't make sense​
​The Coding Career Handbook (HN) (Code)
​Awesome Katas - Curated list of code katas.
​Beginner’s Guide To Abstraction (2020) (HN)
​Code Only Says What it Does (2020) (HN)
​Concepts around building software (Code)
​Evidence-based Software Engineering: based on the publicly available data (Code) (HN) (Lobsters) (Code and Data used)
​Code Reviews at REKKI (2020)​
​Rise of Worse Is Better (Tweet)