We’ve all had that sinking feeling. There are multiple crash reports from production. We have the exact input parameters that caused the failures. We have the stack traces. Yet, when we run the code locally, it works perfectly. If we could simply rewind time and watch the code execute exactly as it did for those failed requests, life would be a lot easier…

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In a typical imperative application, business logic and side effects are inextricably linked. For example, when you write await db.checkInventory(…), the runtime immediately reaches out to the database. Our Effect System works differently. Instead of performing the action, our functions return a description of the action. When our code needs to check inventory, it doesn’t call the database; it returns a plain object instead, which will be executed later by an interpreter.

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If you look at the source code of a typical application, you will likely find business logic tangled with database calls, HTTP requests firing off in the middle of validation rules, and try/catch blocks sprinkled here and there. The biggest casualty of this coupling is testability…

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After building quite a few subwoofers and 2-way speakers over the years, I was looking for something different, and line arrays fit the bill nicely. They use a large number of small-diameter drivers –sometimes as many as hundreds– and have some intriguing characteristics such as little loss of volume as you get further away, low distortion, and very slim enclosures…

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Loops are so common in programming that we often don’t give them a second thought, but a buggy loop has potentially infinite destructive power as it mindlessly repeats its task however many times it’s asked…

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I’ve been building subwoofers for years now, and I’ve always used car audio drivers. However, I recently started building speakers using pro-audio drivers, specifically mid-woofers and horn loaded compression drivers. I love how dynamic and clean-sounding these drivers are, so it was only natural that I decided to give pro-audio subwoofers a try…

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While David Lynch offered very little in terms of what his movies meant, he was generous in sharing his views on creativity, work, and life in general. As a tribute to Lynch, I’d like to share my perspective on his life lessons from a software developer’s viewpoint…

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A popular trope in science fiction movies set in space is running diagnostics whenever something goes wrong with a ship’s systems. The chief engineer might announce something like, “We’ve run a level 2 diagnostic on the thermal regulators…

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I previously built Valeria, a compact bookshelf speaker using pro-audio drivers. The dynamics offered by this small speaker are impressive, if I may say so myself. Lately, I’ve been thinking of building speakers with better bass response and improved horizontal and especially vertical directivity. This necessitated using an 8" mid-bass driver, a compression driver that rolls off below 1 kHz, and a horn that can control directivity better than the B&C ME10 I used in Valeria…

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Despite all its strengths, SQL can be awkward to integrate with host languages such as JavaScript and Python. There’s often an impedance mismatch between SQL’s declarative nature and the host language’s object-oriented or functional paradigms – SQL queries are typically written as strings within the host language, making it difficult to apply composable programming techniques…

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Think back to the last time you looked at an unfamiliar block of code. Did you immediately understand what it was doing? If not, you’re not alone – many software developers, including myself, find it challenging to grasp unfamiliar code quickly…

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Many years ago, I took part in the development of a taxi-hailing mobile app that is still widely used today. I don’t know what kind of code they’re running now, but in those early days, the driver assignment code –if I remember it correctly– was similar in spirit to the grossly simplified example that follows. There are five levels of nested if statements in less than 30 lines of code. It doesn’t look so bad, some might say, but it’s not difficult to imagine how complicated this code can become with just a few more checks…

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