I have written before about UUIDs and other unique identifiers. As a reminder UUIDs are 128-bit identifiers that strive for unique identifier generation without requiring the generation to be done in a centralized location. The specification for UUIDs was written in 2005 and is defined in RFC 4122. This specification…

Recently I was working on a piece of functionality where we ended up with a collection of items that each had a status of if they had been successfully handled or not. At this particular part of the application, we needed to do certain actions on items that were successfully…

Software design patterns are defined as “a general, reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem within a given context in software design.” These patterns often will naturally come out as you develop and even without learning their names or learning about them directly people will often use these patterns. The…

A couple of coworkers and I recently decided to read Modern Software Engineering by Dave Farley as part of a book club we run at work. This book comes to us from one of the pioneers of continuous delivery, the man that literally wrote the book on it. …

Every year about this time I am flooded with images and reminders that it is graduation time. This invariably reminds me of my own education. Several years ago I had the honor of graduating from Utah State University with a computer science degree. There is a solid amount of debate…

Several years ago I heard a man (I believe he was an airport architect) describe one of his job requirements as understanding wayfinding. Wayfinding is defined as encompassing “all of the ways in which people (and animals) orient themselves in physical space and navigate from place to place”. In more…

Whatever you are developing there is going to be at least some type of constraint you are working within. Often this can be something such as time or money. These are business-facing constraints. I have yet to see a project that had unlimited time to complete and where there were…

One of my favorite ways to learn is reading other people’s code and having others read mine. A place we have that opportunity often is during code reviews. I know that code reviews are not everyone’s favorite thing to do but I find them extremely valuable and enjoy doing them…

It is within human nature to take the easiest path from point A to B. This is very often a great thing. Why should we exert extra energy in accomplishing a task? Bill Gates is claimed to have said, “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because…