Record Locators Considered Useful

You know what record locators are, right? Those little 6-8 character random strings that you get with your plane ticket? Have you ever thought about how they're generated and what they mean?

Driving

Your First HPDE - Getting On Track

I started track driving about 5 years ago. It's expensive, noisy, and non-productive. Its also one of the absolute purest joys of my life. If you're interested - even if you don't think you could ever do it - read on!

Development

Overly Complex SDKs

Good SDKs make writing service code easy. Why do so many of them stop just short of where they should?

Chex Mix

Chex Mix should be yours. Use this recipe as a starting point - or not - but adjust it until you can't stop making it. Then back off one notch.

12 Factor

Disposability

Normalize not knowing where - or to some extent why - your processes are. And never, ever, name a server (sorry saruman37)

12 Factor

Concurrency

Sometimes its okay to be a monolith. Or at least one monolith amongst many.

Driving

Race Day

Hanging on to the back of the reasonably decent racers may not be a winning strategy, but it doesn't seem like a losing one either.

Development

Boilerplate is just Tech Debt waiting to happen

Our goal as developers should be to write as much business logic as possible, and spend as little time as possible on anything else. Here's why that matters.

Development

Package Based Development

Thanks a pervasive culture of sharing, almost everything that we write can be thought of as refinements, gluing existing components together and adding only the parts of the code that are truly unique to whatever we're trying to build. It's a great time to be a software developer.

Driving

MSR Cresson in the Challenge Miata

Someone has to bring the slowest car...

Resource Basics

Papertrail

Keeping track of what's going on in your remotely running stateless servers can be a challenge, but it doesn't have to be a chore.

12 Factor

Port Binding

Making sure that you have a single, simple, well-understood entry point to your service.

Development

The Benefits of Keeping it Simple

Everything must be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. But why?

12 Factor

Processes

State belongs in clients and database, nowhere in between.

Tech talk

Ask for Actions but Deliver on Intent

When building a UI, a small change in the way that you think about the user's requests can significantly change the way that you communicate about exceptional conditions.

12 Factor

Build, Release, Run

> Strictly separate build and run stages What problem are we solving? Builds should be repeatable, trivial, and boring. If you can build your application twice in a row on different servers and get different results than you have a problem. Additionally, the build should be hands-off.  If your build

Driving

MSR Houston CCW Track Day

My first DE at MSR Houston going counter clockwise

Development

Date Handling

Dates are invisible and obvious, until they're not. Luckily a little thought and a few common strategies will keep them as boring as they seem.

12 Factor

Backing Services

How should you incorporate 3rd party services, and their configurations, into your SaaS app? Are they just another dependency or something more?

Tech talk

Don't Forget the V

When it comes to MVPs, everyone loves to focus on the M for Minimal. Especially when working in a B2B environment, the Viable portion is all too often neglected.

12 Factor

Config

How and where should you be storing runtime configuration, especially secrets?

12 Factor

Dependencies

How and where do you define, update, and import your dependencies?

Resource Basics

Mockaroo

Good test data helps you see problems that bad test data obscures. Thankfully there's an easy way to get large amounts of it.

12 Factor

Codebase

How many codebases make up a deployable? How many deployable can you build from one codebase?

Development

Don’t Be Afraid to Cheat

Its easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees and get so caught up in solving a technical problem that we don't stop to consider how we could take a shortcut and work around it instead.