James Socol - Coffee on the Keyboard

A photo of the word Debt spraypainted on a brick wall: multicolor shading, bubble letters.

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

A woman in a white shirt points to Central Park on a subway map in a station, giving directions to a man in green

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

A used car lot from the 1950s, named Parker-Robb Chevrolet, and featuring a number of classic Chevys.

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.