Viewing profile — jammycakes

That's a good approach if you can cleanly separate out the old code from the new code, and if you can make sure that you've got all the old functionality behind the switch. Unfortu…

This incident highlights a problem that is often overlooked in the debate about feature branches versus feature toggles. I've worked with both feature branches and feature toggles,…

It isn't in practice. Only a minority of methods actually need it. It's certainly far, far better than having to add exactly the same check after every method call. Which is only w…

Usually, no you don't. You only write a try ... catch or try ... finally block round the entire method body, from the point where you create the resources you may need to clean up …

You clean up processing that your own method is responsible for. For example, rolling back transactions that it has started, deleting temporary files that it has created, closing h…

> External services having gone offline, timeouts, and invalid user input are expected conditions you should handle locally. Not necessarily. You should only handle expected condit…

> No; you simply abstract the underlying subsystem’s exceptions in your own types, the same way you do with any other type. That's all very well as long as people actually do that.…

If you want to (and are able to) document all possible failure modes, then checked exceptions will give you that. As far as I can tell, railway oriented approaches can't. Unfortuna…

Missing dependencies. External services having gone offline. Timeouts. Foreign key violations. Data corruption. Invalid user input. Incorrect assumptions about how a third party li…

> The unfortunately missing part of exceptions (in mainstream languages) is that they handle this invisibly. Figuring out, at compile time, what sort of exceptions can appear insid…

The author followed up this post with another one a few years later titled "Against Railway Oriented Programming": https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/against-railway-orie... R…

> I think a much better pattern would be to enable dev teams to self serve. Set up the required infrastructure and guard rails, then let teams handle their own deployments and infr…

In a previous job, I joined a team that was supposed to be introducing DevOps to the organisation. It started out well -- we spent a few months hacking with Terraform, Docker, Vagr…

The big problem that I have with Clean Code -- and with its sequel, Clean Architecture -- is that for its most zealous proponents, it has ceased to be a means to an end and has ins…

The problem with explicit error handling is that it's all too easy to get it wrong (by forgetting to check the return value) and when it does go wrong, it goes wrong silently, intr…

Hi, author here. As other commenters have noted, this post is seven years old. My position on feature branches has evolved (and softened somewhat as well) in the meantime. I posted…

My apologies :) Incidentally I wrote a whole series of blog posts a while ago where I cast a critical eye over the whole n-tier/3-layer architecture and explained why it isn't all …

Well in the example I've just given they reduced query times from six minutes to three seconds. If that isn't increased efficiency, then I don't know what is. The fact is that some…

> TL:DR Successive, well intentioned, changes to architecture and technology throughout the lifetime of an application can lead to a fragmented and hard to maintain code base. Some…

Pet projects need not take up all of your time. All you need is a few hours every so often — an evening or so once every couple of months, or one weekend a year would set you head …

I started keeping a comprehensive developer diary (I actually refer to it as lab notes) back in December, and it's made a considerable difference to how I think about what I'm codi…

This. Also, I'd have thought that with weekend projects you're more likely to find things out by experimentation and reading the documentation than by asking questions. With work o…

While 80 characters may be a bit restrictive, there is a need for a hard limit of something . I've found that in the absence of a hard limit, you all too quickly end up with a code…