Thoughts, tutorials, and tales from the digital frontier. Lessons learned and wisdom shared.
The moment something depends on your API, you've made a promise, and you usually can't see who you made it to. Which is why the worst thing you can do is expose your raw table. Here's the design lesson, and the argument that taught it to me.
Read moreYou've paid for one, or you're about to, and everyone keeps saying "the backend," "the database," "the API," while you nod along. Here's the whole thing in one picture, and you already understand it, because you've eaten at a restaurant.
Read moreMost apps don't need to be native, and building them native anyway means standing up a whole second discipline your team doesn't have. Here's the case for reaching for the stack your web developers already know, and the honest line for when not to.
Read moreYour site is down, your email is dark, and you've just learned the domain lapsed. First: breathe. A lapsed domain is usually recoverable, and how you get it back depends entirely on which stage it's in. Here's how to tell, and what to do at each one.
Read moreThird in the legacy-code series. I went looking for where a pricing rule lived and found it in the database, in a stored procedure named sp_recalc_v2, invisible to the app and tested by no one. On why the database is the worst room for business logic.
Read moreWhen I finally tracked down the company holding a client's domain, I expected a fight to prove I had any right to it. Instead they handed it over, no questions asked. That should have been a relief. It was the most alarming part of the whole thing.
Read moreSecond in the legacy-code series. I wanted to write one test and couldn't, because testing one piece meant standing up the whole app. On why "add tests later" is a lie until you carve seams, and why splitting a monolith isn't tidiness.
Read moreYou rent it. And the whole thing runs on a renewal you probably never see. Here's how it works, and how to make sure the name your business runs on is actually in your hands.
Read moreFirst in a three-part series on cleaning up legacy code. A bug that compiled clean and broke nothing until a page loaded in a browser, because the data structure at its centre had no type and no owner. On implicit contracts, and why the compiler can't save you from one.
Read moreA client lost her email for a week because a company she'd never heard of owned her domain. Here's what she was never told, in plain terms, and the one thing to check on your own setup.
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