O. Valadares' Blog

Featured

What a good debugger can do – Good languages and programming environments, have good debuggers. Good debuggers can make engineers happy, and code better software.

Go: Using pointers to reduce copies is premature optimization – To use or not to use pointers is a frequently asked question to everyone getting started with Golang. This post has some perspectives, and in the end, like everything in our field, it depends.

Writing a 6502 emulator in Python – Emulators are a good way to learn about programming, and also about computer architecture.

Consistency Patterns – CAP theorem and consistency patterns, this post is a nice introductory post in this field, with 5 minutes read you get introduced to some important concepts.

Clojure’s deadly sin – Laziness is one of the main “features” of Clojure language, in the first hours of learning Clojure, probably you’ll hear about it, but as nothing is perfect, some odd scenarios can happen when working on real code bases. This post brings interesting insights into how laziness can be good and bad. Also is useful if you want to understand what laziness really is.

MISC

Monitoring is a Pain – Monitoring is a pain and we know it! It isn’t something that you deploy one time and just keep using, it will generate a lot of problems and maintenance tasks as your company grows, and most companies will fail to predict the costs of a monitoring platform, it will be expensive if you hire a team to build and maintain it, and it will be even expensive if you buy it!

The Most Powerful Law in Software –  Conway’s Law is one of the most famous laws of development, and using it you can preview any organization, product, or even, influence it. Show me your product and I’ll tell how your organization looks like.

What makes developers productive? – Every company (or PM) wants to know the secret to make developer more productive, some simple things are well known by every people that work in this field, great tooling, platform, and low-tech debit is a good starting point.

Garbage Collection in Ruby – Garbage Collection is hard, and is always useful to have a complete guide about how a specific language garbage collector works. This kind of post is always useful to have in hand, to read many times as needed to understand and remember. This is a fresh new post about garbage collection in Ruby, containing useful links, references, explaining algorithms, and new features (like compaction).