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I think this is true for most programming languages. I want more stylistic, opinionated stuff that comes with contexts and caveats, so I can get to understand t

I think this is true for most programming languages. I want more stylistic, opinionated stuff that comes with contexts and caveats, so I can get to understand their decision making process and avoid footguns that can only be learned through sufficient experience.

mikepurvis 5y ago
I totally agree, though I think those articles are a lot harder (eg requiring more skill) to write well because you need to quickly ramp your readers on all of whatever the context is that's necessary to actually appreciate the nuance of the design decisions under discussion. You're basically by definition going to be out of the realm of "just follow best practice X" or "apply pattern Y or you're doing it wrong." As a small example, I've been working on a small asyncio-based web service (Python) which is oriented around an expensive process that generates a result, where the result is stashed in sqlite and returned. I knew upfront that I needed a way to track when a particular result was already being prepared so that if I got a second request for it, it would collapse it into the first one and only do the work once. I wrote this as a twenty line memoizing decorator, but it turns out this issue as a name— cache stampeding. Once I realized that, I discovered that there are existing (and much more complicated/tunable) solutions to this problem, such as https://github.com/DreamLab/memoize/ https://github.com/DreamLab/memoize/, but the article pitching that solution spends quite a bit of time getting to it— enough so that if I'd discovered it before building my own, I'm not sure I would even have appreciated its applicability: https://tech.ringieraxelspringer.com/blog/open-source/caching-in-the-world-of-concurrent-python-harder-than-ever/8nq1c41 https://tech.ringieraxelspringer.com/blog/open-source/cachin...
- jkhdigital 5y ago
  This hit close to home, especially as a mostly independent developer who can’t ask the neighborhood senior engineer about stuff. A much more basic example of this from my recent experience is discovering GenStage, which solves the generic problem of backpressure in sequential processing but doesn’t appear in the core Elixir documentation.

mikepurvis 5y ago

I totally agree, though I think those articles are a lot harder (eg requiring more skill) to write well because you need to quickly ramp your readers on all of whatever the context is that's necessary to actually appreciate the nuance of the design decisions under discussion. You're basically by definition going to be out of the realm of "just follow best practice X" or "apply pattern Y or you're doing it wrong." As a small example, I've been working on a small asyncio-based web service (Python) which is oriented around an expensive process that generates a result, where the result is stashed in sqlite and returned. I knew upfront that I needed a way to track when a particular result was already being prepared so that if I got a second request for it, it would collapse it into the first one and only do the work once. I wrote this as a twenty line memoizing decorator, but it turns out this issue as a name— cache stampeding. Once I realized that, I discovered that there are existing (and much more complicated/tunable) solutions to this problem, such as https://github.com/DreamLab/memoize/ https://github.com/DreamLab/memoize/, but the article pitching that solution spends quite a bit of time getting to it— enough so that if I'd discovered it before building my own, I'm not sure I would even have appreciated its applicability: https://tech.ringieraxelspringer.com/blog/open-source/caching-in-the-world-of-concurrent-python-harder-than-ever/8nq1c41 https://tech.ringieraxelspringer.com/blog/open-source/cachin...

jkhdigital 5y ago
This hit close to home, especially as a mostly independent developer who can’t ask the neighborhood senior engineer about stuff. A much more basic example of this from my recent experience is discovering GenStage, which solves the generic problem of backpressure in sequential processing but doesn’t appear in the core Elixir documentation.