Feline Follies

Before retirement ended my last spell of unemployment, i wondered if the timing of that dismissal was ideal. one month earlier or later might have been better? improving a server log was my last assignment. like many other companies, their senior management believed in their culture, technology, and tools. like other well-funded companies, they used Splunk and wanted to use JSON format. nobody reviewed the pull request that would have established a baseline for my work. their Splunk dashboard code was not versioned. Overcommunicating JSON can be ideal, and creating a data structure to discover if a log entry describes an error is easy and reasonably fast, but computers find strings very quickly. a faster algorithm uses less electricity; computer activity is human activity. ...

Once upon a time, upgrading packages was just downloading and installing files. after a while, it also entailed compiling source code because my operating systems no longer received first-class support. Descent Into Madness after a while, upgrading a package also entailed upgrading the tools needed to make it and their dependencies. i felt like i had installed every (meta-)build system. on one of my MacBooks, Homebrew maintained two versions of Python and two versions of llvm . as projects migrated from Autotools to CMake, library versions became inconsistent. these inconsistencies puzzled me, because the first test one should perform after adding support for another build system is determining if the result is the same. any differences should be eliminated/explained. in real life, most people didn't ...

An ideal cache entry is created just before its value is first needed and destroyed just after it is no longer needed. typical cache strategies do not (try to) approximate this ideal, but half a loaf is better than none? caching doesn't necessarily help. for example, using another host to cache database query results requires more network usage. determining if the additional complexity and cost are worthwhile depends on the database server's behavior (it might be caching the results already), network connection speeds, etc. in a simpler architecture, a server and its cache are hosted by the same machine. if there are redundant servers there will be duplicate cache entries, so analyzing cost/performance still requires effort. there is no free lunch. Server requirements ...

Once upon a time, i was in a team led by a developer who was devoted to introducing modern standards. he didn't have much experience, so i think this devotion was essentially a cloaking device. though we didn't generate documentation, most pull requests elicited a request for a docstring change. my first post about Holistic Development focused on logging . this one is about generated documentation. though software developers habitually read code, generated documentation can become their primary source of information because it's easier to read. it also assures product owners that features are addressed, and that the design is orderly. Documentation review a docstring is just a comment until documentation is generated. at that point, evaluation of docstring quality should be based on the generate...

While diagnosing an error, it's not unusual to discover that the application log does not contain relevant information while also being overly verbose. DEBUG-level entries can be cryptic, and maintainers often insist that their applications emit them in production environments. the universal acceptance of low quality logs is a management failure. Holistic development a software development protocol should synergize best practices, but we should run away whenever someone claims that success depends on a protocol's complete implementation. incremental development of software is common, as is reusing large frameworks. the development process can mature similarly. Holistic Development is a protocol i should describe someday, but piecemeal presentation makes sense because partial implementation is help...

Don't know how to begin or what to say, but feel like saying something about a few Python development issues. as hosts evolved from actual/virtual machines to containers, server deployment adapted accordingly. hosts were de facto containers because they had service interfaces, but deployment via systemd/upstart was unusual. i know supervisord was also used. virtual environments became popular, because of host-server and server-server dependency conflicts. i avoided this style of virtualization by segregating servers and/or letting some servers govern the dependencies of others. needless to say, containers and machines are quite different. when a container is server-specific, a virtual environment has no value. thus, i install Python p...

And now for something completely different: a stupid script trick ... once upon a time, i worked with two software developers who had just started their careers. after giving them a script, one of them complained that it didn't support the --help option. the script was about ten lines including its shebang, without conditional expressions or complexity of any kind. i defended its informality by noting that scripts are text files, so developers can easily discover how to use them. my response had no effect, but i still think scripts written for members of the same development team may be less formal/helpful than usual. since then, i did change my mind about one thing: for a long time, i used Python whenever statements were conditionally executed. i use the Bourne shell more often now.