Category Archives: technology

September reading list

Nice article on gRPC in a js client, Envoy and go gRPC server https://medium.com/swlh/building-a-realtime-dashboard-with-reactjs-go-grpc-and-envoy-7be155dfabfb

https://blog.codinghorror.com/tending-your-software-garden/

https://blog.codinghorror.com/bridges-software-engineering-and-god/

https://signalvnoise.com/posts/591-brainstorm-the-software-garden

https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-big-ball-of-mud-and-other-architectural-disasters/

The reverse technology relapse

We all know how much the apollo computer technology impacted on consumer technology : https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252466699/How-Apollo-11-influenced-modern-computer-software-and-hardware

Before Apollo computers were huge and filled whole rooms like this :

Burroughs B3500


Apollo guidance system was this :

Space industry led the way to a complete new era of digital personal computers.

We are now in 2020 and we all saw the first launch of a manned private mission to Space Station : the SpaceX dragon capsule attacched to ISS and astronauts @AstroBehnken and @Astro_Doug used a docking interface on a touchscreen device (try it out here https://iss-sim.spacex.com ) to dock dragon.

So consumer/private technology is currently used in the space industry : the complete opposite of Apollo/GoToTheMoon era.

Think of this from a political point of view : there were times when the biggest achievements in technology were driven by US federal agencies, pouring public money into research, universities, private companies to reach unbelievable goals (go to the moon). Those investment has been around $280 billion of today money. This drove the country into years of technological leadership, leadership US is loosing against another country (china) which is doing exactly what US did during the 60s i.e. pouring money into the economy with state participated companies.

Its time for another “go to the moon” type of effort and the new moon is giving this planet sustainable energy for sustainable growth.

Reaction/rejection to complexity and “worse is better”

Some points to further investigate : the main idea is that early 2000 years started a reaction to (unnecessary) complexity :

start here : https://medium.com/better-programming/how-unix-works-everything-you-were-too-afraid-to-ask-f8396aeb2763

simple is better (worse is better) : https://blog.codinghorror.com/worse-is-better/ the point here is all about what is considered to be better. Some furher reading “what’s wrong with word simple

Why use inheritance when a simple object will do : https://www.philweber.com/2002/11/is_inheritance_overrated

optimism in coding is dangerous : https://blog.codinghorror.com/defeating-optimism/

worse is better : https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/WorseIsBetterPositionPaper.pdf

worse is better http://wiki.c2.com/?WorseIsBetter

again : https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

Mar 2020 reading list

Image optimization and compression is one of main features of ImageEngine CDN (I work on this project). This Netflix blog article is great at going into details of why we probably need a new, modern image format : “AVIF for Next-Generation Image Coding” https://netflixtechblog.com/avif-for-next-generation-image-coding-b1d75675fe4

Faster Paint Metrics with Responsive Image Optimization CDNs
https://medium.com/@firt/faster-paint-metrics-with-responsive-image-optimization-cdns-d43340d4a48c

Speed up Woocommerce with an Image CDN https://hackernoon.com/speed-up-woocommerce-with-an-image-cdn-kt1q3yeg

Faster Image delivery with Chrome Light mode https://medium.com/imageengine/faster-image-delivery-with-chromes-lite-mode-93900eac126e

How to Reduce the Carbon Footprint of Your Website by 50% https://imageengine.io/blog/how-to-reduce-the-carbon-footprint-of-your-website-by-50/

Images are not static content https://css-tricks.com/images-are-not-static-content/

Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting https://forge.medium.com/prepare-for-the-ultimate-gaslighting-6a8ce3f0a0e0

grigna

On the importance of design in software

Many time we face situation were productivity of a software team is impaired by initial flaws in system design. These initial flaws require too much time to be completely removed (the effort of complete rewrite is only marginally touched here and is normally and indication of other problems in your software project )

So, in order for a software team to be able to work at its maximum, good design is a must. Design is much more responsible for productivity than any single coder, scrum master, product manager or development methodology/language in the sense that bad design can take an all-star team using top tools/methodology to perform badly.

There were times when it was taken for granted that before building a system, it was necessary to design it. That time looks gone (even though Agile does not explicitly prohibit making good design). The general idea seems to be that there is “never enough time to do something right, but there’s always enough time to do it over” again.

But what is design in software ?

That kind of intellectual activity which creates a whole from its diverse parts may be called the design of a system

Melvin E. Conway, How Do Committees Invent?

So you compose parts to make the whole system. How you do this ?

It is basically decomposition to generate single parts that acting together will generate the goal. The 2 tools you will need as a designer are :

  • decomposition
  • composition

 But first of all you need :

  • understanding of the system boundaries : the borders of the nation your system lives in
  • understanding the global scenario of what your system is going to do. Designing subsystems without knowing the whole picture is not a good idea.

Why decomposition of a system into smaller components (services) is good for you :

  • information hiding : well identified interfaces create a contract that the component has to provide, hiding any network/system implementation details. This will make the component implementation completely free to be modified/enhanced as long as the new implementation is compliant with the contract.
  • less development time : separate components/services can be developed in parallel since they don’t require (or require little) external dependencies, so less contention between engineers. Every component is independent on integration and performance test that can be developed autonomously.
  • scalability : with little effort in design every component might be deployed in a way to be one of many instances that will make that service scalable when traffic increases.
  • clarity : the system could be studied a component (service) at a time with the result that the whole system could be better designed because it was better understood

We could go on here and analyze what are the criteria to be used in decomposing a system into services. I’ll leave this to another moment and you can find some interesting notes here :

https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/09/05/on-the-criteria-to-be-used-in-decomposing-systems-into-modules/

What I would like to stress is that design is a fundamental phase in software engineering. You can’t just skip it and pretend that since you have a good team you’ll get a good job done.

Thanks to the following for inspiring me on this post :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melvin_Conway

https://blog.acolyer.org/2019/12/13/how-do-committees-invent/

https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/09/05/on-the-criteria-to-be-used-in-decomposing-systems-into-modules/