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.

202312091440 Eliminate effects between unrelated things

Also known as orthogonality¹, we should strive to design systems that reduce or eliminate the effects of unrelated things. There are countless benefits, but they generally boil down to 202205031449 Optimize for change and 202203221620 The golden rule of programming.

When it's possible for us to understand and change parts of a system in isolation with the knowledge that our changes won't affect other things, everything simplifies greatly.

Even better, use technology that enforces these separations for you so you can know with 100% certainty that this is how it works.

Thomas, D., & Hunt, A. (2019). The pragmatic programmer, 20th anniversary edition: Journey to mastery (Second edition) (pp. 39). Addison-Wesley. ↩