DaFoster

When making a git commit I’ve been looking for a way to record what AI model or coding agent harness I used to help me write the commit, ideally in a machine-readable way.

Never write your own database or filesystem.

I’ve noticed that the GitHub issue count on my software project Crystal always seems to go up, even though I’m the only one who ever files issues (for now) and even though I’m actually completing issues occasionally.

A Philosophy of Software Design is my favorite book I’ve read to date about designing large long-lived maintainable software programs.

There are a few languages that offer a symbol type, notably JavaScript, Ruby, Lisp, and Erlang.

When a program I’m debugging prints something unexpected like an error message, I can usually search for a fragment of the message in the program’s code to figure out why it was printed.

Software engineering research has identified1 some techniques and rules of thumb for making code reviews more effective at identifying defects: Limit code reviews to 1 hour or less.

I was happy to be able to attend PyCon US 2024 this past year, a prominent conference for the Python programming language.

I find the fire & heat around Redis changing licensing surprising.

Some seafaring ships divide their body into multiple watertight compartments, so that if one compartment becomes flooded the rest of the ship will remain floodfree and intact.

I recently encountered a deadlock while running the automated tests of my website downloader, Crystal.

I recently extended my website downloader, Crystal, so that the projects it creates have a proper icon on macOS, Windows, and Linux.

The official instructions for making a .deb Debian package1 I found to be rather long-winded and fiddly, so I came up with a hopefully more-straightforward method of building a .deb package, using Docker.

Sometimes when I have a problem with a bash script I want the ability to run each line of the script one by one to see what is wrong.

Crystal is a website downloader program that is intended to save websites for long-term archival, even after the original site has fallen off the internet.

I’m proud to release django-mysql-compressed-fields: a new library that provides a compressed version of Django’s TextField for use with a MySQL 1 database!

In March 2021 I was interviewed by Vladislav from softdroid.net.

Crystal is a website downloader program that is intended to save websites for long-term archival, even after the original site has fallen off the internet.

The general availability of easy-to-use centralized continuous integration1 (CI) solutions in recent years - from GitHub Actions2 and Travis as hosted solutions, and from Jenkins3 and Hudson as on-premises solutions - has been wonderful for allowing softw…

Any time a backend Django or Rails function calculates something complex from the database to send to the frontend as part of a view, there is a chance the database will be modified concurrently before the view is displayed to the visitor, causing the site

It’s easy to build a simple chat server in Channels with real-time updates1 but it’s a bit more complicated to design a system for a more realistic (and complex) data model that has real-time updates.

1 server or 2 servers?

If you’ve got a moderate-sized Django web application then you’re probably already writing automated tests to make sure none of its pages break unexpectedly when you’re making changes to them.

Google is working on a new technology called Privacy Sandbox to replace the need for advertisers to track individuals with third party cookies.

Automated tests are usually used for testing functional requirements of your product code.

You may have heard that TypeScript has been taking the web development space by storm in the last few years, bringing to it static types.

I know a number of folks use The Great Suspender to automatically suspend inactive browser tabs in Chrome.

For difficult problems1 I have used naps at home and work to recharge quickly or to temporarily alter my information processing mode2.

What is stress exactly?

In recent years I’ve increasingly noticed software being written that cannot get the performance it needs unless it bypasses usual operating system services.

Dependent types are a feature of certain programming language type systems that are unusually powerful, expressive, and precise, compared with other kinds of types.

What is a timechart?

I have frequently wanted to use the external link symbol ( ) in text that I’m writing, without having to resort to including an image.

There are several patterns for structuring modules in JavaScript.

In this article I will describe the theory of performance testing1 and how we conduct such testing in practice at my company TechSmart, in the context of rich web applications and web services.

The conventional wisdom in the academic community appears to be that a type system is not useful if it cannot be proven to be sound1.

I just started implementing my first big new software feature since the start of the New Year.

When trying a new recipe for the first time I annotate it to highlight certain important parts.

This year I spent a lot of time teaching myself to cook more complicated dishes from cookbooks, doing meal planning, and learning related skills.

You’ve probably heard that global variables are bad.

I spend a lot of time as a professional coder working on very large programs, attempting to grow them while also keeping them from collapsing under their own weight.

The OS X Photos program has a built-in Share button that can post selected photos directly to Facebook.

Why Functional Programming Matters is a famous paper on the merits of functional programming (FP).

Read a very interesting article about error handling in Midori recently, and it got me thinking about errors again.

Why wear a hat?

I recently picked up a copy of The Clean Coder: An excellent book about the non-technical aspects of being a senior software engineer.

I currently work at a software startup and wear a lot of hats.

Some programming languages are better at some tasks than others.

In general I feel that deep algorithm knowledge is overrated in the software industry.

Handling international and Unicode text correctly in modern programming languages remains a poorly understood topic.