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ruminations

A collection of 13 posts

Crafting Integrity

Enrich Skilled trades should enrich lives indiscriminately. Hone your character as you hone your skills. Avoid exploiting, polarizing, or alienating. Embrace humility, uplift others, and foster community and inclusion. Protect the dignity of all. Genuine success is rooted in desiring others to succeed. Elevate There is nothing profound or praiseworthy

functional programming

Embracing Theory In Software

I recently read a social media post about a functional programming book, in which the author praised it for avoiding complex terms such as “referential transparency” and “category theory.” The rationale seemed to be that these terms could complicate discussions about programming unnecessarily, at least in discussions about the essentials.

Empathy in Software Design

Designing for Real Life One of the books that have been most influential on my thinking in software design was not a book on technical design patterns or theory, but a book called Design for Real Life by Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher. The book talks about designing your software

Choosing Elegance: The Case for F# in Application Development

This post is for Day 6 of F# Advent Calendar. We all know the go-to languages for most companies in application software development: Java, C#, TypeScript, and Python, to name a few. There's obviously nothing wrong with using these ubiquitous languages, but there's a tendency to

Adaptability

In software development, the lure of the latest fad can be intoxicating. Whether it's an influential thought leader extolling the virtues of their favorite project management methodology, or the notion that enterprise software must be built with the hot language or framework, it's easy to find

Abstraction, Again

In normal life situations there is always the possibility that something will get in the way of logic working perfectly. We might think that, logically, one plus one is always two, but in real life some aspect of the objects in question might get in the way. If someone gives

Listening

When you are listening to the stories of accomplished men and the like, you should listen with deep sincerity, even if it's something about which you already know. If in listening to the same thing ten or twenty times it happens that you come to an unexpected undertstanding,

React and Functional Programming

💡As I was planning this post, I looked around to see if anyone else had written on this and indeed someone has in this this post, and I recommend it. I decided to add to the topic rather than restating what was said there. The introduction of hooks in React

Abstraction

💡My thinking around this topic is influenced by Eric Normand's Lispcast episode on abstraction. Check it out, and his podcast. Abstraction is a common topic in programming discussions. You hear a lot about the right abstraction, the wrong abstraction; this level of abstraction or that level; leaky ones,

reactive programming

Reactive Programming - Tower Defense for Data

Following a reactive approach to development is like setting up defenses in a tower defense game. You set up your pipeline of operators, each with its own skill and its own preferred target - and that’s it. Allow the application to send in the events and watch the operators

functional programming

Lambda Calculus and Arguments

Functions in the lambda calculus are always unary - they only take one argument. Functional programming is based on the lambda calculus, and it is useful to learn to appreciate unary functions. One useful way to train your brain to think functionally is, when you find yourself writing an n-ary

Deno, Node and TypeScript

JavaScript is considered decent language for functional programming, particularly because its weak, dynamic typing combined with arrow functions make for succinct code. After using F# more though I've really come to appreciate type-driven development. Strong types and functional programming go so well together, I've essentially completely

design patterns

Demystifying Design Patterns

Often times I find it beneficial to look outside of one's own industry for inspiration. There is often a lot of practical wisdom to be gained from areas that seem unrelated to our own domain, and possibly even similar problems that have already been solved. This has proven