Tech — Work — Ramblings

by Mike Kalvas

I see you're not using JavaScript (which is awesome!) on one of my pages that uses it to provide a better experience. If you see something not working right, please let me know. My site should work exactly the same without it apart from any exceptions noted here.

I use prism.min.js to do syntax highlighting. It clocks in at 23kb total in size. Since the majority of the writing I do involves coding, I personally find this to be a worthwhile trade off. If you choose to keep this disabled, rest assured, the code examples are still there, they just may have some extra whitespace and obviously no syntax highlighting.

I do no tracking at all and am a zealot about keeping my pages as small as possible. If you're reading a page of mine that transfers more than about 250kb over the wire (including my most gratuitous indulgence — fonts) I've messed up.

So, if you'd like to have a slightly richer experience, consider enabling javascript for my site and I promise your trust won't be misplaced.

202203221630 Slow is steady, steady is smooth, smooth is fast

Slow is steady, steady is smooth, smooth is fast

This saying originates in the American armed forces.¹ The idea is that taking your time to do things right brings consistency, correctness, and ultimately a speed advantage over doing things quickly and poorly.

This saying has broad applications across so many areas but I often find myself thinking about it in a 202109061338 Software Engineering context. In particular it's, similar in a lot of ways to 202203221620 The golden rule of programming, but more about how to achieve that rule in practice.

Freeman, M. (2018, January 24). “Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast”—LessWrong. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4FZfzqMtwQZES3eqN/slow-is-smooth-and-smooth-is-fast ↩