Published in tedspence.com·Jul 20Member-onlyThe simplest cache: the lazy loaderYou can get most of the benefits of caching with virtually none of the work Your code is fast, and your database is fast. You can read data from it anytime you want, and you never have to worry about stale records. But are you leaving performance on the table? …Caching4 min read
Published in tedspence.com·Jul 11Member-onlyThirteen API caching mistakes to avoidSo many ways to mess up your API with poorly designed caches It’s always a good time to start with my favorite programming joke: There are only two difficult things in computer science; cache coherency, naming things, and off by one errors. I may not be able to fix the…API11 min read
Published in tedspence.com·Jul 1Member-onlyThe enduring weirdness of the Sega SaturnA transitional fossil in between the era of scan-line sprites and triangles In November of 1994, Sega released one of the most unusual console game systems of all time: the Saturn. It was a fascinating mishmash of home console development tools, arcade technology, improvements in computer science, and random ideas…Gaming13 min read
Published in tedspence.com·Jun 2Member-onlyCaching database queries in TypeScriptAn effective strategy for storing relevant data using invalidation and stale-refetch In my previous post on caching for authentication, I described a tiered caching strategy that would preserve the validation results of a cryptographic validation function that could taken dozens of milliseconds to execute. The same approach can also optimize…Typescript6 min read
Published in CodeX·May 16Member-onlyWhat makes a Jupyter notebook good?Charts are nice, but a notebook needs a compelling story to tell I review dozens of Jupyter notebooks each week from my DA320 students at Bellevue College. Even though all students study the same material — a dataset with information about Superhero movies — the quality of notebooks varies widely. …Jupyter Notebook4 min read
Published in CodeX·Apr 30Member-onlyBranching considered harmfulDevelopers should work on trunk, use a monorepo, and automate deployment As a company grows in size, it tends to accumulate source code in a variety of repositories and branches. One startup I joined had over 80 repositories — about eight repositories for each developer they employed at the time. …Version Control7 min read
Published in tedspence.com·Apr 12Member-onlyZero DependenciesReduce the baggage in your published libraries Each week my company publishes updates to the Lockstep TypeScript SDK, a small NPM package that provides a convenient way to use our REST API. It’s a wrapper around a REST API, and it provides context sensitive help when you hover over API…Security4 min read
Published in tedspence.com·Mar 26Member-onlyDon’t give your API bad error messagesPoorly thought out error messages can affect the usability of your API I spent some time working with Google’s Cloud Platform this week, and I encountered an interesting error message. I followed the instructions that Google provided for making an API request, and I got the error Permission denied for…API5 min read
Published in Lockstep Developer·Mar 22Lockstep API release notes for March 2022Lockstep Platform API changes for releases 2022.8 through 2022.12 Features and changes included in the Lockstep Platform API: New Financial Account APIs for tracking ledger accounts New Balance History APIs for tracking balances in ledger accounts New Trial Balance Report API and Income Statement Reports API to provide visibility into…Patch Notes2 min read
Published in CodeX·Mar 20Member-onlyShould your API use enums?Enumerated values are a clever validation technique that can be risky for an API Enumerated values are a great way to use type safety to your advantage. They make otherwise tricky-to-remember numbers or strings easy to use. Unfortunately they can also pose risks for API developers. I was a big…Sdk4 min read
