tech debt Tech Debt, Depreciation, and Features There was some discourse on Twitter (yes, it's still there, for now) yesterday about the nature of Technical Debt and how effective it is as a metaphor. The real seed was the new boss arguing with—and eventually firing—one of the few remaining engineers on the Android team. But
human factors Root Cause, Proximal Cause, or Least Effort to Remediate I am no fan of "Root Cause Analysis." It's one of the many terms or concepts that software has borrowed from manufacturing—while ignoring the subsequent 70 years of research into human factors and resilience engineering. However, like Lorin, I admit that it has some value during incident response. It's
open source Open Source Subway Map If you don't actually want to read this whole post (no shame at all) the tl;dr is that I'm going to try using a GitHub project to organize and hold myself accountable for open source maintenance. Mental health is a weird thing, sometimes. Like, oh I don't know, everyone,
metrics Naming metrics, or why my statsd client doesn't support tags It may not be a popular claim, but I still think logs and metrics serve an important role in modern observability along with tools like tracing. And there are a number of tools for collecting metrics, like Etsy's StatsD and other implementations, Datadog, Promethus, the ELK stack, and others. One
technical What is "Tech Depreciation?" As soon as you drive that software off the lot, its value will start going down. "Tech debt" is a well-known and useful metaphor, but I've found it doesn't describe the whole picture. Technical debt is a choice, a trade-off—sometimes made well—that can be paid down. It describes
So you want to depend on something? I was chatting with a friend recently about a potential refactor they were considering that would've reduced overall lines of code. I realized we were talking about a very concrete opportunity to apply dependency inversion. I typed up a quick note and decided to expand it here. These examples are
The Triforce of Deployment Continuous delivery is great. Fortunately, so are all the tools you need to get there. I've talked [https://github.com/jsocol/talks/tree/master/2013-06-13-firstmark-cd] about this [https://github.com/jsocol/talks/tree/master/2017-05-03-queensjs-cd] a number of times [https://jamessocol.com/speaker.html]—including recently on Software Engineering Radio
teams Unclear Asks are Killing your Team We've all been in a meeting, wondering what the goal was, and why we were invited. Some of us have even gotten up, said something, and left. The truly bold may have suggested ending the entire meeting and reconvening with a plan. We've also all gotten an email addressed to
Remembering TodaysMeet Nearly 10 years ago, I launched a small chat tool [https://todaysmeet.com]. Somehow, through a lot of luck, and a bunch of hard work, it managed to become popular among classroom teachers as a way to enable new kinds of conversations. Now it's time to say goodbye and move
PIEfection Slides Up I put the slides for my ManhattanJS talk, "PIEfection" [https://github.com/jsocol/talks/tree/master/2016-01-13-manhattanjs-pie] up on GitHub the other day (sans images, but there are links in the source for all of those). I completely neglected to talk about the Maillard reaction [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
conde-nast New Year, New Role Yesterday was my last day at the job I’ve been in for most of 2015. Later this month I’ll be joining the digital team at Condé Nast! I’ve been interested in media, publishing, and journalism since I was a kid, growing up in the office of a
Code Open Source Update: Waffle I just pushed version 0.11 of Waffle [https://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-waffle/0.11], the feature flipper for Django [https://www.djangoproject.com/]. It contains a number of code and documentation fixes [https://github.com/jsocol/django-waffle/compare/v0.10.1...v0.11] which you can also see
Open Source Update: Jingo Update: Jingo is no longer supported as was deprecated in favor of django-jinja at the end of May 2016. As part of shuffling around open source responsibilities [https://coffeeonthekeyboard.com/open-source-update-bleach-1359/], I’m going back to being the sole maintainer of Jingo [https://github.com/jbalogh/jingo] for now. I
bleach Open Source Update: Bleach As of today, I transferred ownership of Bleach [https://github.com/mozilla/bleach] to the Mozilla organization, and the Mozilla WebDev team, in particular Will Kahn-Greene [http://bluesock.org/~willkg/] and Jannis Leidel [https://twitter.com/jezdez/], are taking over maintenance of it. Huge thanks to Will, Jannis and Chris
The Fallacy of "Microservice Infrastructures" [http://microservices-infrastructure.readthedocs.org/en/latest/] “Awesome, now, did someone remember to build a product?” The problem with these advanced, complex microservice infrastructure [http://microservices-infrastructure.readthedocs.org/en/latest/] ideas [http://mantl.io/] is that they presume an impossible starting point: you have a large, senior operations team, big enough
programming Storing date, time, and timezone for future events Tantek [https://twitter.com/t] recently published a blog post encouraging developers to use UTC with timezone offsets [http://tantek.com/2015/218/b1/use-timezone-offsets] for storing dates and times. There is, however, an unfortunate nuance his post doesn’t include, and so I’m pointing it out here. For
Back-end An Object Caching Pattern for Django Increasingly I’ve been treating even RDBMSes like structured key-value stores. There are still foreign keys and relationships in there, but the access patterns are most commonly by some kind of “primary” key (not always the primary key on the table, but a natural one). Normally when I do something
email For the love of Email Email is the whipping technology of communications. Everyone wants to kill email [https://www.google.com/search?q=replace+email]. Email is also, for all its problems, fundamental to most modern business communication. While many teams rely more on real-time platforms like Slack or HipChat*, or even IRC, which definitely
deep-dive Digging into "that" Python error I think this is my most popular tweet ever: > >>> foo = ([],) >>> foo[0] += [1] TypeError: 'tuple' object does not support item assignment >>> foo <<< ([1],) — James Socol (@jamessocol) February 12, 2015 [https://twitter.com/jamessocol/status/565906946780581889] I’ve known about this little quirk for a while, but I shared it because
Back-end Visualizing the 2015 SotU on TodaysMeet Now that you know how TodaysMeet works [https://coffeeonthekeyboard.com/how-todaysmeet-works-1237/], here’s part 2: using the message queue architecture to build the SotU visualizations. TodaysMeet [https://todaysmeet.com] has a long history [http://blog.todaysmeet.com/case-study-meeting-during-debates-88/] with political events [http://blog.todaysmeet.com/2014-state-of-the-union-room-205/]. During the 2012 Presidential
django How TodaysMeet Works I want to write about TodaysMeet’s 2015 State of the Union [http://blog.todaysmeet.com/sotu2015-on-todaysmeet-426/] site, but I realized I spent half the time on the existing architecture. So, this is part 1, and here is part 2 [https://coffeeonthekeyboard.com/visualizing-the-2015-sotu-on-todaysmeet-1246/]! A little over two years ago,
django Testing with Django's Cache I don’t love my solution to this problem, so I’m writing about it in hopes that someone has something better. When you run tests with Django, you get an isolated test database. This can be wiped out and the consistency makes life a lot easier when you are
Code Bounties and Tips Last week [https://coffeeonthekeyboard.com/biweekly-ish-update-07nov2014-1185/] I wandered into the tip4commit fracas [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8542969] and a “helpful” commenter pointed out Bountysource, so I started asking some questions there. There must have been a few others doing the same thing because, to their credit, they started
irregular update Biweekly-ish Update 07/Nov/2014 My finger [https://coffeeonthekeyboard.com/irregular-update-24oct2014-1176/] is mostly healed. I have a whole new terror of flaying. And Teacher Tools [https://todaysmeet.com/about/teachertools] launched! I’ve been focused on getting the word out and answering questions from customers this week. I’ve also tried to come up for
Mozilla's Secret Browser Disclaimers and Me A disclaimer: I used to work for Mozilla, but I don’t anymore. It’s been about a year and a half. I still maintain a couple of Python projects under the greater Mozilla FLOSS aegis. But otherwise, I’m just an enthusiastic Firefox user these days.
