It’s been a bit over two months since I’ve started writing weeknotes at work, and I’m sure you’re all on the edge of your seat dying to know how it’s going. Well, I’m please to say that, on net, it’s been quite helpful.

Now, I’ve gotta be honest here: doing weeknotes is not quite a decision that’s completely my own. We’re technically required to write these notes and submit them to our managers¹. But I was so bad at doing this. Most weeks I submitted nothing at all, and when I did write something, it was little more than three or four dot points with a Jira ticket number and a summary.

So I guess you could say the decision I made here was writing “good” weeknotes. And I think putting some effort in the notes I wrote was the right decision to make. I managed to clear the first hurdle, which was developing a routine. First thing Monday morning, after booting my laptop and before I grab my (second) coffee, I sit down for 15-30 minutes and write out what I achieved last week and what I plan to focus on for the week ahead. I switched away from dot points to writing prose. It’s not very interesting prose — it’s little more than “last week I did this, this week I’ll do that” — but I think it makes for a better record of what I was working on. I hear that others keep their weeknotes open during the week so they can add to them as things crop up, sort of like a live journal. I tried this for a little bit, but the day-to-day tasks I work on are not particularly interesting. I think the weekly summary works.

I think there’s still areas for fine tuning this, particularly around the content itself. As useful as the weekly record of work could be, I think including some thoughts of designing a task or opinions on how we do things could also be beneficial, or at least interesting. I do know that my manages read these notes, as I’ve received questions from them about them. And although I’ve yet to actually need to reference previous notes I’ve written (it’s only been two months after all) I’m guessing that’ll just come with time as well.

So this is definitely something I will continue (again, partly because I have to).

Oh, and I did end up using the blogging feature in Confuence for this. First time I used it for anything, actually.

Got gallery.folio.red back up this morning. Took longer than I hoped, since the cert expired and renewing it was delayed due to the Lets Encrypt outage. Also fought with the bugs in Photo Bucket during the upgrade. But the import worked and the site’s back up again, so all’s well that ends well.

I’ve been really enjoying all the WeblogPoMo posts that the PoMo bot has been relaying. Discovered a bunch of new blogs this way, that I’ve now added to NetNewsWire.

Had to miss the first part of Micro.camp this year, unfortunately. My meeting with the sandman went long. Hope to catch up on the keynote and state of the platform videos later.

Had a great venting session with someone at work about the practices of micro-services, the principals of component driven development, mocking in unit tests, and interfaces in Go. Maybe one day I’ll write all this up, but it was so cathartic to express how we can do better on all these fronts.

If anyone is to ask what I think, here it is in brief:

1. Micro-services might be suitable for what you’re building if you’re Amazon or Google, where you have teams of 20 developers working on a single micro-service. But if you’ve got a team of 20 developers working on the entire thing, you may want to consider a monolith instead. Easier to deploy, easier to operate, and you get to rely on the type system telling you when there’s an integration problem rather than finding it out during runtime.
2. The idea of component driven design — which is modelled on electrical engineering principals whereby a usable system is composed of a bunch of ICs and other discrete components — is nice in theory, but I think it’s outlived it’s usefulness for most online services. It probably still makes sense if you’re stuck in the world of Java and J2EE, where your “system” is just a bunch of components operating within a container, or if you actually are vending components to be reused. But most of the time what you’re working on is an integrated system. So you should be able to leverage that fact, rather than think that you’re building and testing ICs that you expect others to use. You’re not likely going to completely replace one component for another when you need to change a database (which you’re unlikely to do anyway). You’re more likely going to modify the database component instead. So don’t make that assumption in your design.
3. This also extends to the idea of unit testing, with the assumption that you must test the component in isolation. Again, you’re not building ICs that you’re expecting to transplant into other projects (if you are, then keep testing in isolation). So it makes more sense to build tests that leverage the other components of the system. This means building tests that actually call the components directly: the service layer calling the actual database driver, for example. This produces a suite of tests that looks like a staircase, each one relying on the layers below it: the database driver working with a mock database, the service layer using the actual database driver, and the handlers using the actual services. Your unit test coverage should only be that of the thing you’re testing: don’t write database driver tests in your handler package. But I don’t see a reason why you shouldn’t be able to rely on existing areas of the system in your tests.
4. The end result of doing this is that you’re tests are actually running on a mini-version of the application itself. This naturally means that there’s less need to mock things out. I know I’ve said this before, but the idea of mocking out other services in unit tests instead of just using them really defeats the idea of writing tests in the first place: gaining confidence in the correct operation of the system. How can you know whether a refactor was successful if you need to change the mocks in the unit test just to get them green again? Really, you should only need to use mocks to stub out external dependencies that you cannot run in a local Docker container. Otherwise, run your tests against a local database running in Docker, and use the actual services you’ve built as your dependencies. And please: make it easy for devs to run the unit tests in their IDE or in the command line with a single “make” command. If I need to set environment variables to run a test, then I’ll never run them.
5. Finally, actually using dependent services directly means there’s less need to defined interfaces up front. This, after starting my career as a Java dev, is something I’m trying to unlearn myself. The whole idea of Go interfaces is that they should come about organically as the need arise, not pre-defined from above before the implementation is made. That is the same level of thinking that comes from component design (you’re not building ICs here, remember?). Just call the service directly and when you need the interface, you can add one. But not before. And definitely not because you finding yourself needing to mock something out (because, again, you shouldn’t need to mock other components of the system).

Anyway, that’s my rant.

Flights to Canberra booked. Going to be bird watching again real soon.

If the macOS devs are looking for something to do: here’s a free idea. Detect when the user is typing on their keyboard, say using keystrokes in the last N seconds, and if it’s greater than some low number, prevent any window from stealing keyboard focus.

I must agree once again with Manual Morale on his recent post about search and the future of the web:

I think curation, actual human curation, is going to play an important role in the future. In a web filled with generated nonsense, content curated by knowledgeable human beings is going to be incredibly valuable.

Ben Thompson has been arguing this point too: in a world of AI generating undifferentiated “content”, that which has the human element, either in it’s creation or curation, would stand apart. He says he bets his career on this belief. I think it’s a bet worth taking.

How is it that it’s become so natural to write about stuff here, yet I’m freezing in my boots drafting up an email to a blogger in response to a call for some feedback?

Love that NetNewsWire has a setting to open links in Safari instead of the built-in WebView. Very useful for articles which require an active login session, which I’m more likely to have in Safari. To enable, go to Settings and turn off “Open Links in NetNewsWire”.

Never thought I’d be desperate enough for food and money that I’d be forced to learn everything there is to know about authentication, OAuth, and SSO, but here we are. 🤓

P.S. I’m trying to be droll here. Please don’t test me on my knowledge of OAuth or SSO. 😅

I appreciate projects like Next.JS put a lot of effort into their guides, but they still need to provide a basic API reference. Knowing about request helpers is fine, but do they return strings or arrays? What if a query parameter’s not set? This is stuff I need to know. 🤷

Working in the project which is using TypeScript for the code, and Go for the deployment configuration. Wish it was the other way around, where Go is used for the code, and TypeScript… isn’t used at all. 😛

👨‍💻 New post on Databases over at the Coding Bits blog: PostgreSQL BIGSERIAL “Type”

I haven’t gone all in with AI co-pilots or anything with my coding setup yet, but the latest version of GoLand comes with what is essentially a line completion feature that I actually find quite useful. I suspect there’s some ML in there as it seems to understand context and produce suggested line completions that are, more often than not, pretty much what I was going to type out by hand anyway. Many times I could implement most of a new function simply by typing Tab several times. Impressive work, JetBrains.