Podcasting has definitely been a journey for both of us. When we started BJ wasn’t even a developer and Will was working for himself. Now 8 years later BJ is leading a team of developers and Will is back working for himself. It has been an amazing journey with you all this past years. We have both learned a lot about ourselves, programming, leadership, and audio engineering (well Beej learned about audio). However, like all things, it can’t last forever. Sometimes you just hit a point where you realize that you can go on, but your heart really isn’t in it any more. That’s kind of where we bot ..read more

Simple systems fail simply. Complex systems also fail simply, but their interconnectedness with other systems makes mitigating failures much more complex. Past a certain level of complexity, system failures are an emergent property of the system – that is, the set of system parts has a set of failure cases that the individual parts do not have by themselves. This means that it is more difficult to predict what can go wrong with a system. At some level, prediction is nearly impossible. However, you can predict many of the things that are likely to cause problems, simply by engaging in a few fa ..read more

Feedback is any information, observation, or even opinion about the performance or behavior of another individual our group. It can be formal as in performance or peer evaluations or informal such as with mentoring a junior developer. It is a form of communication designed to provide guidance that helps the other person to grow and achieve their goals. Providing feedback gives insights and identifies areas of improvement. Often it is used to guide those you are leading toward personal and professional growth. To the person receiving the feedback it can be stressful, especially if it is not al ..read more

Database sharding is a process of storing a large database across multiple machines. Because a single machine can only hold and process so much data, eventually some systems will scale beyond the ability of a single machine to handle data. Further, as systems scale, they may also need to split data between machines due to security and location considerations. Database sharding overcomes these problems by splitting the system into smaller chunks, allowing work to either be done in parallel, or only in the locations with the relevant data. Obviously, it matters a lot how you split up your data ..read more

Effective communication is a vital aspect of any organization or team’s success, and one tool that has been proven to be very useful is the Four Square Report. This report is a simple and effective way to communicate information about a project or task to a team or stakeholders. It was originally developed by the U.S. military to help soldiers communicate critical information in a clear and concise manner, and has since been adopted by many organizations and industries. 4 square reports were refined by the construction industry and have since been adapted to fit the needs of software developm ..read more

If you haven’t noticed, technology moves fast. There are constant improvements and reworking of every programming language out there. Sometimes the changes are small and easily dealt with, while sometimes the changes are huge. Complicating things further, most developers need to learn a wide variety of tools and frameworks in order to be effective in their current job. At a minimum, most of us need some kind of front end framework, a database (and its associated libraries), an IDE, a source control system, and some sort of devops. For most of us, it’s worse than that. And it gets even more fu ..read more

Understanding ACID and BASE databases is critical for any organization or individual who is involved in developing, managing, or using modern database systems. Both types of databases have distinct characteristics and trade-offs, and choosing the wrong one can have serious consequences on the performance, reliability, and security of your application. ACID databases are designed for applications that require strict data consistency and accuracy, such as banking, e-commerce, and financial systems. These databases provide strong guarantees that all transactions are processed in a reliable and p ..read more

APIs are a huge part of development today and one of the most common types of API out there is a RESTful API. REST stands for representational state transfer, which is a software architecture that imposes conditions on how an API should work. Essentially, it was created as a set of guidelines for how communications should work between disparate systems on a complex communication network (like the internet). REST is implemented atop HTTP and uses the standards in the underlying protocol as part of the standards for communication. In a RESTful API, client and server applications are considered ..read more

There is a common demonstration, that we’ll do as a thought experiment, when talking about priorities. It has a person fill a bucket with sand, then try to add as many pebbles to the bucket as possible, following that they are to add larger gravel, then fist sized rocks. The obvious thing that happens is the bucket fills with sand and they are not able to add much else to it. Then they are instructed to add them in the reverse order so that larger rocks first, then gravel, then small pebbles, then the sand. Doing it this way more large items are able to be added to the bucket then the smaller ..read more

Mob programming is a technique for getting multiple developers in the room, working on the same code. While possibly not the best technique for many situations, it really shines in certain narrow use cases. When it does work, it can often produce impressive results that a few separate developers couldn’t produce on their own. The collaborative aspects of mob programming are similar to pair programming in some respects, with very similar upsides and downsides. In a mob programming session, a stakeholder and the team will first identify the goal of the session, which should be a testable outcom ..read more