Lane's Blog

20 rules of thumb for writing better software.

College has been prescribed almost universally by the parents of the last ~40 years as the solution to life’s problems.

I found this proposal for improvements to error handling in Go interesting, but still not something I’d be happy to see implemented.

The ideas behind the DevOps movements undeniably changed the software development world for the better - but by now, the term “DevOps” has lost all meaning.

Saying “no” is a hard skill to learn.

What is a dark pattern?

It’s insane to me that almost every web developer in the world is working with web APIs, and yet the developer experience remains atrocious.

I’ve been writing online for about 4 years now, and I’ve learned a bit about “SEO” - this blog and my side project’s blog (my side project being Boot.dev) now have combined traffic of about 100k visits each month.

Working on a side project that aspires to be a real business has its ups and downs, especially after you’ve been at it for over 2 years.

I grew up a faithful member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or the Mormon Church for short.

A few years ago I found Dev.to, and was delighted by the writing experience.

I want to talk about a simple rule of thumb that has served me well over the years.

Luckily, I’ve met very few engineers in my career who are outright opposed to continuous deployment.

Agile development is fantastic and has made software development more fun and productive while simultaneously less punitive and slow.

I’m normally a fan of the opinionated rigidity within the Go toolchain.

We can’t optimize for everything when developing software, so we need to start with something, and that something should be simple code and simple architecture.

We had applications at one of my previous companies that typically ran with ~2GB in memory at any given time, but by simply changing the order of some uint variables we managed to drop the memory usage to less than 1.4GB.

Managers who can’t code are an outdated artifact of corporate America circa 2005.

Scrum is a buzzword, the virtue signal of choice for middle management in software organizations.

“A Case for the Book of Mormon” is a book that is not freely available as far as I’m aware, but in this response, I will include relevant quotes for readers who don’t have access to the full book.