Opinion

I was recently introduced to a simple article on system design: Users are almost always right. In it, a simple rule is stated: When the users keep doing it wrong, the users are right and your system is wrong. This rule reminded me of the concept of desire paths: unplanned trails created by human or animal traffic that usually represent the shortest or easiest route between two places. Desire paths in an urban setting often run counter to what a planner might suggest, leading to a natural conflict between the pedestrian and the planner....

When people describe progress, they often describe it in terms of a linear progression taking us from primitive to advanced — an idea or invention occurs as a singular event, and somewhere further down the line of time a new idea or invention completely replaces it, relegating the old to the annals of history. This viewpoint is exemplified by traditional worldviews that organize all beings according to a chain of evolution, sometimes called the “great chain of being” (or scala naturae)....

In a shopping cart, the swivel wheels of the cart are set in the front, and the fixed wheels are set in the back. Now picture yourself pushing a shopping cart backwards. Almost naturally, you swivel the cart to move the front end to one side or the other before beginning to push the cart. Now picture yourself pushing a shopping cart backwards, on an ice rink. Here, the cart keeps sliding around even after you’ve stopped pushing it....

Building and running a successful company requires an immense amount of work and talent. It also requires focus. Companies cannot try and solve problems with new and innovative techniques everywhere they operate. It is important to understand the areas your company should innovate in, and outside of that scope, use existing standards and off-the-shelf software as much as possible. There is only so much innovation that a company (or the market) is willing to bear and walking that line is a key factor in developing a successful product on time and budget....

Infrastructure is undergoing a significant paradigm shift. At my first job as a software developer, scaling our infrastructure meant buying a physical machine and installing it in a rack, setting up the system images and base software by hand, configuring the network using some shell scripts, and finally, making it available for developers to install software. Now, with the advent of cloud computing, the same capabilities — installing and running software — are available on-demand....

Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without. Confucius We all want to have a perfect product, a perfect system, and a perfect development story. Unfortunately, reality is … reality. And it’s not perfect. One of the biggest struggles of engineering well is understanding the constant push and pull among the forces that govern the “rest of the business”, and governing your technological and development choices accordingly....

I was fortunate enough to attend Google Cloud Platform Next last week and wanted to summarize a few of my thoughts on the conference. As I sat down to analyze the event, I found a few distinct themes that I would like to expand on. Multi-Cloud Google is serious about multi-cloud support for their monitoring and integration products. As a cynic, if Google wants to steal customers from Amazon, offering tools to aid the transition is in their best interest....

Imagine a fledgling software startup consisting of one or two developers. They are following the lean startup methodology by throwing ideas and implementations at a wall to see what sticks. This methodology demands keeping your application as simple as possible until you find the optimum market. An on-going concern for the developers is finding a simple, flexible way to store application data: NoSQL or SQL? The NoSQL database offers a premium out-of-the-box experience: install a package, start the database, and post and retrieve data using a JSON API....

I’ve spent the past eight months working from home thanks to some great support from my employer, allowing me to support my wife and children and still contribute as a meaningful employee. Working from home with four small children and a loving and supportive wife has brought its fair share of both challenges and delights. This post will describe the working from home experience and the lessons I’ve learned along the way. ...

At VendAsta we’ve been integrating with the Stripe payment system using Stripe Checkout. The experience has been completely painless and surprisingly simple. Then came a hiccup. While demoing the new functionality we found that one particular computer in the office would open the checkout modal dialog in a new browser window. Just one laptop. It was running the same version of Chrome that we were developing on. It was running the same OS as a working test machine. But the dialog would consistently open in a new browser window on just this one laptop. ...