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.

202312091434 Have a single source of truth for invariants

Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation in your system.¹

Even though I do not generally like the DRY principle because of its over-generalization, misdirection, and ease of misuse (202204262054 Prefer duplication over the wrong abstraction), I do think that it can be helpful when discussing sources of truth.

For instance, an application should only have one authoritative way to get an object or model where important invariants and business rules can be housed. Then we know that everyone who's making a new user or something will have e.g. the same validation requirements.

Thomas, D., & Hunt, A. (2019). The pragmatic programmer, 20th anniversary edition: Journey to mastery (Second edition) (pp. 31). Addison-Wesley. ↩