Building to Last

Welcome to Iteration: A weekly podcast about programming, development, and design through the lens of amazing books, chapter-by-chapter

On following fashions

• What are short-lived trends? What will stand the test of time? How to approach hot new techniques:

Ask yourself:

1. Does the code feel easier to read and change after refactoring?
2. How did the complexity increase or decrease
3. Did you run into any new issues?

• John: If you keep changing with the trends “your codebase will be a patchwork of different styles making it very hard to understand or change”

there are no silver bullets

Surviving the upgrade pace of Rails

• Gems increase the cost of upgrades (so do NPM modules)
• 👀 react navigation
• Don't live on the bleeding edge

Owning your stack

• Own the gems you put in.
• How do you decide on if a gem is worth including in your library? should you just write some small helpers yourself to accomplish it?
• Idea of maxing out your current toolbox first
• Should you use redis? or can you just use another sql table?
• John: When you pull in dependencies - YOU OWN IT. IT’S YOUR CODE NOW.

The value of tests

• We're a broken record here. one thing to point out is that this lets you release often!
• You can also work on one part of the app in isolation without having to worry about the rest
• John: Test suite is like a light in a dark house - give you enough coverage so you know there isn’t a monster lurking

Picks:

https://www.notion.so/ - How meta - we use Notion to manage this podcast.

Episode source