The diligent cowboys programmer

Move fast and make things

This focuses on 4 groups of software:

• CLI tool (command line interface)
• Services with APIs
• Libraries
• GUI (both Web based and native, which includes mobile apps)

Here’s my recipe for -disaster- success:

• Extensibility and features are a cost, learn to say no.
• Move fast, version your code, e.g. use git, commit constantly, push to an upstream repository.
• Always focus on getting functionality up and running first and foremost. Everything else is secondary.
• Be very afraid abstraction layers within your code base. Only add on an as-needed basis, that is, there must be at least 2 implementations of your abstraction layer.
• Design for futureproofness. Add a version number to data structures, prefix all endpoints to APIs with a version number, add –version to your CLI tool/mobile app/footer of web app so callers can know if a new flag/feature is supported or not, etc.
• Test your service on a staging instance first.
• Write a smoke test if necessary. Don’t make it too complex or too slow, just test the succeeding use case.
• Unit test the edge cases, mainly failure cases. Do not unit test successful cases to much, it’s redundant.
• Aim for 70%~80% code coverage, including smoke test. It’s very language dependent.
• Always write the server (or library) and a client simultaneously. That’s the only way to write a proper API that is as tight as possible.
• Write two clients in different languages if you can, e.g. there’s a need.
• Use language agnostic data encoding (json, protobuf, capnproto, thrift, etc). Know what you’re getting into for each encoding. Do not use XML, ever.