Slack’s business logic for showing notification periodically appears in LinkedIn posts and such. In Slack’s original post, this diagram was meant to illustrate what logic was being transferred from the multiple Slack clients to the server, but the diagram has since been taken as an example of product complexity and how development is harder than it may sound. In contrast, I think the diagram obscures the intended logic, but the logic itself is not complex. I’ll describe how to simplify it and where diagrams might not be the right approach to convey requirements.
Being on-call is often a necessary part of the job, particularly for engineers in a SaaS business. The burden of operations often negatively impacts morale and productivity. If we were to estimate the impact on a team, we could build a model based on incident frequency, ticket severity, time of alert versus sleeping schedules, and other operational metrics. Alternatively, we can ask the on-call engineers directly, which should be more accurate, and use the metrics to help drive improvements. This article describes an on-call experience program intended to be integrated into an operational review system.
COBOL is for Big Data. Well, sort of. Awhile back, I noticed that the COBOL SORT verb was overpowered. Rather than sorting an array of items or even sorting a file, it included a generalized ability to stream in arbitrary inputs — () => Stream[T] —, where T is a key/value pair, and process the outputs in order — SortedStream[T] => ().
“The best way to grasp the spirit of a programming language is to read example programs” as Knuth wrote in the “The Early Development of Programming Languages” 1. Today, it is common practice to provide an example program on the front page of a programming language’s marketing site (i.e., a “hero code example” as it were). Since the objective of the example is to showcase the language’s value versus others, what coding tasks best fulfill that? Beyond Hello World, which is the most popular example coding task, there is little agreement between sites. I survey existing practice, discuss the utility of the Trabb-Pardo Knuth algorithm, and make recommendations on tasks that can demonstrate value versus the “next best alternative”.