Modern Margin

About

Posted 15 days ago · 57,448 reads

APIs are contracts. Once you publish one, changing it becomes expensive for everyone who depends on it. The cost of breaking changes compounds over time, which is why the boring, conservative choice is usually the right one.

Terminal emulators are primitive tools compared to modern IDEs, but they force a certain discipline. You can't rely on auto-completion and syntax highlighting to write code for you; you have to understand what you're writing.

Optimize for comprehension first.

Code reviews are less about finding bugs and more about ensuring that the team understands why a decision was made. The review is a conversation, not a gate.

Type systems don't prevent bugs—they just catch certain categories of bugs earlier. The real benefit is the documentation they provide about what a function is supposed to do.

Type systems don't prevent bugs—they just catch certain categories of bugs earlier. The real benefit is the documentation they provide about what a function is supposed to do.

Terminal emulators are primitive tools compared to modern IDEs, but they force a certain discipline. You can't rely on auto-completion and syntax highlighting to write code for you; you have to understand what you're writing.

See also

More on this topic

Readability is not about clever code or terse syntax. It's about making the intent of the code obvious to the next person who reads it—which might be you, six months later, having forgotten everything.

Make boring choices.

Most of the code we write is not rocket science. It's ordinary business logic, wrapped in layers of frameworks and abstractions. Sometimes the simplest implementation is the best.