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.

202312091445 Rely on what you control

Don't design systems to rely on properties of things you don't control.¹

A simple example of this is building an integration with a 3rd party. You may need to understand and implement specifics of an API that you don't control, but you should always write that code defensively and ensure that changes or bugs in their system won't affect yours. Of course, there are times when that system needs to be online for yours to operate correctly, but you can still ensure that your data isn't corrupted, or your users still have a good experience even though that other system is broken. Remember to 202312091449 Encapsulate at the boundary.

Thomas, D., & Hunt, A. (2019). The pragmatic programmer, 20th anniversary edition: Journey to mastery (Second edition) (pp. 42). Addison-Wesley. ↩