Published in tedspence.com·Jun 2Caching 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 16What 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 30Branching 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 12Zero 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. …Security4 min read
Published in tedspence.com·Mar 26Don’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 20Should 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
Published in tedspence.com·Mar 11Caching strategies for authenticationYou should expect high performance authentication from your APIs It takes time to verify a password or any other kind of authentication token. Yet customers demand high performance from our APIs. So how can we bridge this gap? The stumbling block is that verifying an authentication token is slow on…Authentication7 min read
Published in CodeX·Mar 8Dot Net library compatibility with Core and FrameworkThe challenges of compatibility with historical versions of Dot Net Framework I’m very grateful that the .NET ecosystem is now properly open source. Prior to the introduction of DotNetCore, we lived with what is now known as the DotNet Framework —and there’s still lots of DotNet Framework software out there…Dotnet6 min read
Published in Lockstep Developer·Feb 17Lockstep API Feb 2022 release notesPlatform API Changes for releases 2022.3 through 2022.7 Features and changes included in the Lockstep Platform API 2022.7 release: Added Create Batch Import, a new connector-focused API that provides strong validation of input data objects. Added support for Webhooks so that applications can register themselves to receive notifications when objects…API2 min read
