Justin McGuire's Programming Blog

I'm not in management, but damned if I don't love a good management paper.

There is one scene that gets referenced several times in Rapid Development by Steve McConnell as an example of a hugely productive team.

Joel Spolsky's writing and opinions are evergreen, and his 2004 book The Best of Software Writing shows it.

A 1984 paper that models the time it takes to complete a project, and shows what happens when you are up against bad deadlines.

All of this comes from reading everything in Martin Fowler’s https://www.martinfowler.com/microservices/, and many of its linked articles.

excerpt from How Complex Systems Fail

For my own reference, here are notes I took while reading Google's book on SRE.

If you're responsible for a large, legacy code base, here's my hint to you: delete your failing tests.

A small trick to make "before" a bit more powerful, a bit more useful, and a bit more dangerous.

Eric Brewer and Daniel Abadi expand our notions of what the real trade-offs are in the CAP theorem.

A scientist's idea of literary criticism is different from most people's.

Chuck Jones inspires UI designers in this classic paper from Ungar and Chang.

In 1991 Ungar and Smith wrote about the experimental programming language SELF, and in it described duck typing, calling it behaviorism.

The great benefit of knowing the command-line is being able to write scripts to analyze scripts, all in ~1 minute.

How I write CSS.

I hand-crafted the CSS for the site.

After a lifetime of programming and compsci education, I've had some issues learning with Python.

When I first read the gang of four’s Design Patterns I dismissed most of it as a coverup for the unfortunate parts of C++’s object design.

font-feature-settings is a great CSS feature to play with, but it should probably be turned off in code blocks.

The greatest problem in learning object oriented design is in the toy problems.

Learn the right way to write a program the wrong way

This paper is considered seminal in Object Oriented Design, but Parnas never mentions objects, and his example program is described in procedural programming terms.

You can't trust Ken Thompson.

It shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that New York taxes were managed by a handful of programmers.