Mismanaging resources is one of the easiest ways to bring down a production system. In a development environment, it’s easy to ignore open streams and temporary files, but at production scale, they can have a hugely negative impact. Unfortunately, it’s far too easy to overlook these issues while developing, even…
code quality
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…
The dangers of garbage-collected languages Any programmer that has had to manually manage memory knows the value of automatic memory management, also known as garbage collection. Garbage collection prevents several potential bugs that occur in manually managed memory, such as dangling pointers, double free errors, and several types of memory…
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…
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…