Notes on software, systems, and the decisions behind them.
I set up three metrics to tell whether my codebase was getting worse, and dropped all three. What replaced them: five yes-or-no checkup items, most of them enforced by a commit hook.
Five bug fixes over eight months left ten pieces of state across three files. No single change was wrong, and nothing was watching what they added up to.
Rethinking validation in legacy modernization: the deployment unit is not the validation unit
For years, every DOM Element in my app had 16 methods the browser had never defined.
I'm building an Electron-based Markdown note-taking app. The editor alone is over 40,000 lines; the full codebase has grown past 160,000 lines. I started out writing everything myself.…
