One thing that irks me beyond all reason is Robert Martin’s seething dislike for databases. In every presentation he’s ever given, the one thing he’s sneered at is people who “write their code around a database.” In one of his lectures he says, “I don’t want to see a database in your design. I want to see the objects you’ll use, and I want their names and locations in your project file to reflect how you’ll use them.”

This is probably the lousiest piece of advice he’s ever given. Because let me say this once and simply:

SQL is a programming language, not a storage mechanism.

Uncle Bob has a passage early in his book where he criticizes the function below, calling it “too long” and “missing context”. I agree that it’s cluttered and hard to read, but his representative solution is, frankly, absurd. He turns this into a C++ class with static methods for providing the modifiers to the text, all the while ignoring the huge elephant in the code: it does two things.

Lab notes for the first two weeks of January.

I’ve been fiddling with a branch of the PamSeam project named Lattice in an effort to streamline the base and speed up the runtime. There are three algorithms enabled and all of them have similar processes. The basic engine is also very slow, with lots of large allocations and copying the image over and over.

My great legacy to the world, a small bit of observability in web server configuration.

I recently read an article on the economics of ancient Rome that suggested that, while the written arts, especially those that involved education or erudition, were highly valued, the visual and performance arts were not. The visual arts, especially, were regarded as the work of the lowly and demeaned, as almost all the arts we see from Rome, Pompeii, and Herculaneum, all of the frescoes and mosaics that have survived to this day, were made by slaves.

I realized the other day that my role in my current job requires that I do something very, very strange, as far as I’m concerned. I realized there are some things I have to avoid learning, and I have to avoid them quite strenuously. I have to know they exist, but I have to not know any more than that.

One of my tasks is to help software engineers write their own tests and documentation. To be good at that, I have to help them focus on the kind of documentation they’re writing, and at the moment that documentation is “pager duty” how-tos: short instructions for how human beings must respond to problems and issues with the running system.