Technical debts
When you buy a house, you raise a mortgage. When you buy a car, you raise an auto loan. Maybe you are rich enough to clear all the debts at once, but anyway, we all live with debts, more or less. In fact, for software developers, we all live with debts as well. They’re so called technical debts. I really like the debt analog, technical debts are similar to debts in real life. Funny enough, most of people know how real debts work, but technical debts are not well known by developers. However, it makes sense. People live with the idea of debts maybe for thousands years, but there are only few decades history of computer.
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Read the full articleKeep a readable Git history
Readability of code is important, there is a fact
Code is read more than it is written
This is so true, even when you are writing code, actually, you need to read the current code base again and again. Back to the ancient programming era, people are still using forbidden black magic - goto statements. Powered by the black magic, there is a demon Spaghetti code, and it looks like this
(From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Spaghetti.jpg under Creative Commons 2.0 license)
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Read the full articleFall in love with continuous testing and integration - Travis-CI
You know, testing is important for software development. With good continuous integration and testing there, you have confidence that your software has a certain quality. It doesn’t mean your software is prefect then, however, when things broken, you can catch them and fix it. Jenkins is a pretty awesome and easy-to-use open source continuous integration tool, but for developing my own hobby open source projects, I just don’t want to rent a server and run Jenkins. So, I am always wondering, wouldn’t it be nice to have something like CI as service? I can just put my code there, and it could do the rest for me.
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Read the full articleZero-downtime Internet process migration in same host
When I am running my website, something troubles me. While there is a bug in the production server, I need to modify code and restart them. Sounds fine, right? Yes, for most of web servers, they are stateless, it is not a big deal to restart them whenever you want, but it is not true for me, they are realtime audio streaming servers. When you restart a realtime streaming server, it means audience connected to the server will be interrupted. Here is a diagram shows the problem:
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