Viewing profile — tarmstrong

Agreed that they should mention an alternative in the article. Another article on the CBC from last summer has a good list of alternatives that I found helpful: http://www.cbc.ca/n…

> Software is significantly different from buildings in that it can be substantially upgraded or redesigned after going into production. I used to think this was true, but after ta…

"500 Lines or Less" is an entire book of articles just like this. Each chapter guides you through a small (500 loc or less) implementation of a common component (eg a web server). …

When you say cyclists in Toronto can be awful, what do you mean? Are they mean to you, or do they not follow the rules of the road, or something else? When I cycle I fear being kil…

This is a great teaching moment for anyone who works in UX or observability, but it's worth keeping in mind that the FCC's Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau (who operate t…

No difference — we are using Kubernetes's native cronjob support. This post is about how we migrated to that system.

They're making a joke about the misspelling of Matt Damon. "Daemon" is a computing term [0] and /sbin/ is a folder that you might want to put a Matt Daemon in. (Also, daemons are o…

> You need to be just as sure that the partial revert will not interact poorly with other parts of the new code that you are not reverting. By partial revert, I'm imagining that th…

> But the author's idea that you should generally plan to soldier through to newer code if things go wrong during deployment as a standard operating procedure betrays a lack of exp…

> No one argues that. I've encountered this argument in real life. I agree it sounds a lot like a straw man though and doesn't help much with my argument -- thanks. And I agree tha…

If you took all the time you spent writing comments like this and spent it instead on questioning why the norm for other companies is 10-90 or 20-80, we probably wouldn't be having…

I'm Canadian too. I sometimes use "you guys" when speaking to a group that has women in it; I don't use "guy" in the singular when talking about generic technical roles because it …

Not all programmers (engineer or otherwise) are guys -- probably worth keeping that in mind if you want this to be a welcoming community for everyone (:

Great point. Thanks!

There are regulations that affect the work of software engineers. PCI DSS is one that I am familiar with. Perhaps unfortunately, if your software interacts with the real world (lik…

OP here. I work at a company that is able to move quickly, and yes, sometimes breaks things in the process. Tradeoffs between speed and safety are fine to make, in my opinion. It d…

> their primary obligation is to the ethical standards of their profession, not to their employers. OP here. The intended subtext of my post was that it would be nice if our indust…

> The only thing better that I would recommend is to actually make your own Docker. It's not that difficult, you're basically just slapping together some system calls and execvp()i…

The third book was released earlier this month. Since then, nothing new.

Thanks! And a whole lot more congratulations are owed to the kind folks who wrote the words that go inside the book, and those who helped with copyediting. :-)

We're veering off-topic here, but why did you buy so many bay leaves?

"Scale" is a funny word. It doesn't scale in terms of decision making speed. But it does scale in terms of decision making quality . Obviously if social cohesion within the group i…