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Essays on programming I think about a lot
Computers can be understood • Choose Boring Technology • The Wrong Abstraction • Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names • The Hiring Post • The Product-Minded Engineer • Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend • The Law of Leaky Abstractions • Reflections on software performance • Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods • End-to-End Arguments in System Design • Inventing on Principle
In the face of this complexity, it’s easy to assume that there’s just too much to learn, and to adopt the mental shorthand that the systems we work with are best treated as black boxes, not to be understood in any detail. Then we made some changes, and became a machine that spotted and recruited people like Alex: line of business .NET developers at insurance companies who pulled Rails core CVEs out of their first hour looking at the code. In a messy world where clients and servers that may occasionally crash or have their connections drop partway through a request, it’s a huge help in making systems more robust to failure.
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