Background Users have been using Lucidchart for a long time to make their diagrams, since 2010 and IE6. And for nearly that long, Lucid has used Google’s Closure Compiler to manage its increasingly sophisticated code base. Closure Compiler is a typechecker and minifier that uses JSDoc annotations in comments to…
Articles by Paul Draper
The problem Package and managers Packages are collections of software: data files, binaries, executables, source archives, etc. These are published, resolved, downloaded, and installed with package managers. Unfortunately, in 2017, almost every package manager has the the ability, the default, or even the common practice of creating nondeterminism in the…
Lucid Software validates every pull request for its internal code base. Running over 1000 builds a day across 80 projects strains the robustness of our code, tests, and tools. For example, several times a week, builds complained about the default Java version. It didn’t make much sense. Our servers are…
Uglier than a Windows backslash, odder than ===, more common than PHP, more unfortunate than CORS, more disappointing than Java generics, more inconsistent than XMLHttpRequest, more confusing than a C preprocessor, flakier than MongoDB, and more regrettable than UTF-16, the worst mistake in computer science was introduced in 1965. I…