Scott Werner: The Wizard With the Very Defensible Pond
There was once a wizard who lived beside a pond. It was a small pond. The sort of pond that probably gets called a “water feature” on a Zillow listing by a real estate agent who really knows their euphemisms…
My Google account is heaven@gmail (long story), so I get a steady trickle of emails from people writing to God. Some of them are real winners.
Consider the world’s simplest database:
#!/bin/bash db_set () { echo "$1,$2" >> database } db_get () { grep "^$1," database | sed -e "s/^$1,//" | tail -n 1 }
– Designing Data-Intensive Applications, 2nd edition, Martin Kleppmann and Chris Riccomini
I’ve been a daily coffee drinker for decades, and I’m taking a break for a month right now. No real reason, just trying it.
Halfway through, not much to report. One mild headache early on. No noticeable difference in energy. (I’m pretty insensitive to caffeine.)
I definitely still miss it though!
Fixed time, variable scope
Just like content development in any other medium, software development reduces to the elimination of entropy. Unlike other media, however, there is very little else to count. The problem is that you and/or your team can only eliminate a fixed-ish number of bits of entropy per unit time, and at the outset you don’t know how many bits there are in the problem to eliminate. So you say we’re gonna work this much, and whatever comes out the other end of that process is whatever you get. In the current theory, and sometimes in practice, this is how sprints are supposed to work, and the material that doesn’t fit is accumulated into some backlog or other.
