More often than I expect, I come across software projects that consist of multiple source control repositories. The reasons vary. Perhaps it’s thought that the web frontend and backend aren’t tightly coupled and don’t need to be in the same repository. Perhaps there’s code that’s meant to be used throughout an entire organization. Regardless, there are real costs involved in the decision to have a development team work in distinct, yet related, repositories. I believe these costs are always overlooked.
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Author: Chris Farber
Are You Smarter Than the Compiler?
So, are you? It’s extremely unlikely, but you probably knew that. I recently questioned whether I could refactor away a branch in some arithmetic code, and I had a fun time rediscovering first-hand that I am not, in fact, smarter.
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A Swift Architecture for Managing State: Revised
In my previous blog post, I wrote about an approach for managing state in a Swift app. Following that post, some changes were made to the Swift language that deprecated some convenient syntax my approach relied on. After some thinking, and with a better understanding of Swift’s approach to mutability, I’ve slightly revised this architecture to reduce a lot of friction.
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A Declarative Architecture for Swift Apps
Update: I’ve written a new blog post describing how I’ve improved upon this architecture.
I’ve long been interested in seeking ways to design software in a declarative way. That’s why I’ve lately been very interested in tools like Om Next that provide good patterns for managing the state of your entire application and rendering UI based off that state.
I was recently assigned to a new iOS project using Swift, which was a great opportunity to to learn Apple’s new language and see if I could leverage it to bring a greater level of declarativeness to iOS programming. Read more on A Declarative Architecture for Swift Apps…
Configuring rc Flags on OpenBSD via Ansible
A recent project of mine involved configuring an OpenBSD system via Ansible. On OpenBSD, some software must be configured using command line flags set in rc.conf.local. Every time I ran the Ansible playbook, the flags would be reset to their defaults (more precisely, erased entirely from rc.conf.local). What gives?
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Pitfalls to Avoid When Moving from Clojure to ClojureScript
I’ve been excited about ClojureScript, its community, and the new tools and libraries that have been appearing, but I’ve only recently started working with it. Using ClojureScript to power a web (or mobile) client to a Clojure backend service seems really compelling. It’d allow for easily sharing code or logic between the different components, as well as a well-designed implementation of modern UI development, via Om Next. It’s also a fun and enjoyable language.
However, while exploring ClojureScript, I’ve run into some areas that left me feeling frustrated. Read more on Pitfalls to Avoid When Moving from Clojure to ClojureScript…
Exploring Logic Programming in Clojure’s core.logic – Finite Domain Constraints
In my last blog post, I went over a basic introduction to some of the concepts of logic programming. In this post, we’ll extend our last example to produce some real values (with meaning outside of the logic engine) using finite domain constraints. Read more on Exploring Logic Programming in Clojure’s core.logic – Finite Domain Constraints…
Exploring Logic Programming in Clojure’s core.logic – Overview & Understanding Palindromes
Ever since I saw William Byrd and Dan Friedman present on miniKanren at Clojure/conj a few years ago, I’ve been distantly interested in the topic of logic programming. Recently, my interest has intensified, so I picked up a copy of The Reasoned Schemer and have been working through it.
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Better System Tests – Increasing Testability without Sacrificing Elegance
Writing tests for your software is a great idea! I’m glad we’re all doing it. And I’m glad we’ve all put a lot of thought into categorizing the tests–by unit, integration, system, etc. Of all the tests you can write, my professional experience has shown repeatedly that system tests are the most valuable. Nothing gives you as much proof as validating the entire system working in concert. Read more on Better System Tests – Increasing Testability without Sacrificing Elegance…
Computed Properties with Computed Dependent Keys in Ember.js
Ember’s support for computed properties and bindings is excellent: powerful and not too complicated. Every so often, however, I find myself wanting a particular feature that is not built into Ember’s object system. I want the ability to declare a computed property whose dependent key(s) are actually the value of another computed property. Read more on Computed Properties with Computed Dependent Keys in Ember.js…