joshuago’s software_engineering Bookmarks

A well-rationalized framework for git branching policy. Good for personal and commercial projects.

A great overview of the current state of affairs as concerns software documentation. Emphasizes DRY and automatic code generation, two widely known but oft-ignored ideas. An excellent reminder even for software engineers who have heard it all before. Recommended for regular review.

When programming in higher level languages that allow for increased productivity by orders of magnitude, running into rare but important cases -- where abstractions leak -- will eventually force you to drop down and understand things at the lower level anyway. It's helpful to know how the underlying thing works.

It’s hard to imagine now, but there was once great excitement about the potential for LDAP based directory servers to become more than just authentication servers and morph into general purpose datastores. LDAP directories promised a single, scalable, high performance data store that could be queried for common information across multiple applications.

A commit should contain exactly one logical change. A logical change includes adding a new feature, fixing a specific bug, etc. If it's not possible to describe the high level change in a few words, it is most likely too complex for a single commit.

Designers need to be there start to ship: from strategy to launch. This is different from other companies. Share early and share often. Sharing with the team and users helps make the design better. Don’t fall in love. Software is impermanent –it is always changing and you need to accept that.

First think of the consumer of the API. Think about his likely situation and the problems he's facing. He doesn't want to learn a new abstraction and he doesn't like the fact that your API is going to make him change the design of his program. Design for the benefit of the consumer, not your ease of implementation.

These techniques could be the difference between molding a product people will actually pay money for and going out of business with an idea you thought was perfect.

Highcharts is a charting library written in pure JavaScript, offering an easy way of adding interactive charts to your web site or web application. Highcharts currently supports line, spline, area, areaspline, column, bar, pie and scatter chart types.

A seminal blog post which helped to spark the current widespread NoSQL mania. It defines various criteria by which we can decide if a solution is truly scalable or not.