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.

202312091449 Encapsulate at the boundary

We should code systems that encapsulate external systems at the boundaries of our system.

For example, if I'm building an app that consumes an API, I should encapsulate the specifics of the API at the very edge of my system. This is a translation layer that turns the calling and results of the API into a shape that I control.

This is a particularly powerful — and nearly required — pattern when working with type systems. We take in values that are unknown, spend the effort to well-type them at the boundary, and then the rest of our app does not need to check if that external value was good or not since they only use the internal representation. Using this pattern, you only 202312091445 Rely on what you control

See also: 202205121023 Use values as the boundary