Building to Last
Welcome to Iteration: A weekly podcast about programming, development, and design through the lens of amazing books, chapter-by-chapter
On following fashions
- What are short-lived trends? What will stand the test of time? How to approach hot new techniques:
Ask yourself:
- Does the code feel easier to read and change after refactoring?
- How did the complexity increase or decrease
- Did you run into any new issues?
- John: If you keep changing with the trends “your codebase will be a patchwork of different styles making it very hard to understand or change”
there are no silver bullets
Surviving the upgrade pace of Rails
- Gems increase the cost of upgrades (so do NPM modules)
- 👀 react navigation
- Don't live on the bleeding edge
Owning your stack
- Own the gems you put in.
- How do you decide on if a gem is worth including in your library? should you just write some small helpers yourself to accomplish it?
- Idea of maxing out your current toolbox first
- Should you use redis? or can you just use another sql table?
- John: When you pull in dependencies - YOU OWN IT. IT’S YOUR CODE NOW.
The value of tests
- We're a broken record here. one thing to point out is that this lets you release often!
- You can also work on one part of the app in isolation without having to worry about the rest
- John: Test suite is like a light in a dark house - give you enough coverage so you know there isn’t a monster lurking
Picks:
https://www.notion.so/ - How meta - we use Notion to manage this podcast.
