Links

Think of me as a web crawler with taste.

APIs as infrastructure: future-proofing Stripe with versioning

Brandur Leach:

Versioning is always a compromise between improving developer experience and the additional burden of maintaining old versions. We strive to achieve the former while minimizing the cost of the latter, and have implemented a versioning system to help us with it. Let’s take a quick look at how it works.

Explicitly modeling changes between versions via a DSL.

PumpkinDB

About PumpkinDB:

PumpkinDB is essentially a database programming environment, largely inspired by core ideas behind MUMPS. Instead of M, it has a Forth-inspired stack-based language, PumpkinScript. Instead of hierarchical keys, it has a flat key namespace and doesn’t allow overriding values once they are set.

The core ideas behind PumpkinDB stem from the so called lazy event sourcing approach which is based on storing and indexing events while delaying domain binding for as long as possible. That said, the intention of this database is to be a building block for different kinds of event sourcing systems, ranging from the classic one (using it as an event store) all the way to the lazy one (using indices) and anywhere in between.

Multiple Perspectives On Technical Problems and Solutions

John Allspaw:

In my experience, when an architecture review brings attention to a problem and proposed solutions from multiple perspectives, decisions become less controversial. When a decision appears to be obvious to a broad group (“Question: should we (or should we not) take backups of critical databases? Decision: Yes.”) how a decision gets made almost disappears.

Monads Are a Solution to a Problem

Max Kreminski:

Monads are a solution to a specific problem: the problem of repetitive code. If you write enough code in a functional programming language, you start to notice that you’re writing a lot of suspiciously similar code to solve a bunch of superficially different problems. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just write this code once and then reuse it, instead of rewriting it slightly differently every time? I’m omitting a lot of detail here, but this is effectively what monads allow you to do.