Why defaults matter more
Naming is one of the hardest problems in software, yet we spend less time on it than we should. Let's talk about why it matters and how to get better at it.
Recent writing
- Design debt we never talk about· 8 hours ago · 36,430 reads
- Simplicity as a selling point· 31 minutes ago
- Lessons from legacy codebases· 55 minutes ago
A philosophy of naming conventions
Distributed systems fail in ways that are hard to predict. After years of debugging production incidents, certain patterns keep recurring. This post explores a few.
From the archive
Performance optimization is a tempting distraction. Every line of code that exists to optimize one specific case is a line that must be maintained and understood forever.
About this site
I write about software architecture, distributed systems, and the craft of programming. Posts are infrequent but hopefully worth the wait.
Thoughts on writing. Updated sporadically.
Elsewhere
Occasional notes on design topics. Past essays here.