Lack of Imagination

It’s 2 in the morning, and you’re reading an incident channel: checkout is failing, orders are stuck, and support is starting to field angry messages from customers who can’t get past payment.

“Mocks are the mind-killer.

You’re testing a new feature in a development environment.

We’ve all had that sinking feeling.

In Managing Side Effects, we built a tiny JavaScript Effect System that treats side effects like database calls as data descriptions rather than executable promises.

If you look at the source code of a typical application, you will likely find business logic tangled with database calls, HTTP requests firing off in the middle of validation rules, and try/catch blocks sprinkled here and there.

After building quite a few subwoofers and 2-way speakers over the years, I was looking for something different, and line arrays fit the bill nicely.

Loops are so common in programming that we often don’t give them a second thought, but a buggy loop has potentially infinite destructive power as it mindlessly repeats its task however many times it’s asked.

I’ve been building subwoofers for years now, and I’ve always used car audio drivers.

David Lynch passed away in January 2025, shortly after being evacuated from his Los Angeles home due to the Southern California wildfires.

A popular trope in science fiction movies set in space is running diagnostics whenever something goes wrong with a ship’s systems.

Well-made hi-fi speakers sound great at low to moderate volumes, but many begin to suffer at high volume levels.

SQL is great!

Think back to the last time you looked at an unfamiliar block of code.

Many years ago, I took part in the development of a taxi-hailing mobile app that is still widely used today.

When writing code, you can call any function as long as it’s public, and similarly, you can access any object’s public properties or methods.

I’ve been using a pair of KEF LS50 Metas as my front speakers and my DIY KEF LS50 clone as the center channel speaker in my home theater for a while now.

I started programming in GW-BASIC on an IBM PC clone running MS-DOS.

Recently, I had a conversation with a junior developer on my team.

Linux comes with all the basic tools necessary to deploy an application to development and production environments, and to roll back to any past version if something goes wrong.

In the beginning, there was only HTML.

In a relational database, foreign keys are normally used to associate records stored in different tables.

All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection." – Butler Lampson The great majority of the software architectures currently in use are variations of the layered architecture, and what really sets them apart is the implemen…

Over the past two decades, I’ve worked as a software developer, tech lead, and CTO at various startups, including my own.

Software development would be a lot easier without so many bugs.

But it works on my machine!

Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, developed an interest in biology while he was a graduate student at Princeton.

I will never forget the time I discovered how web pages were made.

I was looking to buy speaker stands for my KEF LS50 Metas and the DIY KEF LS50 Clone I use as my center channel speaker.

It’s often said that reading code is harder than writing it, but is it really?

What happens when a function call fails?

Over the years I’ve seen all sorts of SQL mistakes made by developers on my teams, and I’ve made quite a few of them myself.

“Only the paranoid survive.” – Andy Grove No software developer in their right mind would trust user inputs in an application.

KEF makes some of the best coaxial speakers in the market, and they use the same driver platform in all their speakers ranging from the entry-level Q series to all the way up to Blade.

Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software is an influential book that describes around two dozen software programming patterns.

First things first… How to write production quality code in 12 steps: Understand the problem.

There are many ways to write automated tests, and you may have heard about test doubles as a way to make testing easier.

B2B (Business-to-Business) software is different from B2C (Business-to-Consumer) software for several reasons, but the most important one is this: In B2B, each customer isn’t an individual but a company with its own unique needs and workflows.

I’ve worked at software development startups including my own throughout my career.

I use pro audio power amps in my home theater.

A few months ago, I bought an entry-level CNC router from a local supplier, knowing full well that I would probably need to modify it extensively.

There are a lot of things to consider before starting to write code: Which software libraries to choose?

Subwoofers are probably the most misunderstood and difficult-to-integrate components of a music or home theater system.

All Software have Bugs It’s inevitable.

I don’t like to exercise.

I still remember a quote from a computer magazine I read when I was 12.

I write because I want to share what I know with others.

First a little context: At Faradai we had been using PostgreSQL on the ext4 file system for a number of years until it recently became evident that the constantly growing database size (over 5 TB at the time) would start to cause issues in general perform…

Vendor lock-in: An unfortunate condition that forces a person or company to continue using a disliked product or service just because they invested in it so much.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.