Chesterton’s fence is a useful principle in software engineering (and in life): do not remove a fence until you know why it was put there in the first place. For software engineers, that means a behaviour or a line of code probably exists for a reason; remove it and you may trigger trouble.
Read more →Over the years I’ve tried all sorts of to-do apps, productivity systems, and task management tools. But I keep coming back to one approach that’s unbeatable in its simplicity: a single, prioritized, list of checkboxes.
Read more →The relational databases that many software engineers are most familiar with, e.g. Postgres or MySQL, are row-oriented: they store data row-by-row. For a given row, its columns are stored next to each other on disk. This means that fetching all the data from a row is fast.
Read more →Bloom filters are a data structure that can quickly answer whether an element is a member of a set. Because they are probabilistic, they tell you whether an element is maybe in a set, or definitely not in a set.
Read more →In Django models, it’s easy to customize the queryset that’s returned by a model manager. Say that you’re working on a blog, and you have a model that looks something like this:
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