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.

202205031435 Evolutionary approach to software design

An evolutionary approach to software design and development is simply the acceptance that we can't know what we'll need in the future.

Instead of trying to pin these decisions down and hit some specific goal in the far future which we'll likely miss (202204031033 Abstractions and future-coding are actively harmful), we build a system that allows for flexibility (202205031219 Agility is not equal to speed) and reliability through change (202205031449 Optimize for change).

There are many versions of an evolutionary or iterative approach to software design and development. One of the most popular over the past decade has been the Agile methodology. At their core, these approaches are simply different ways of iterating and evolving to our changing circumstances.