Creating diagrams is a stereotypical software architect task, but the fact of the matter is that a picture can convey a thousand words of information. Diagrams are important for understanding. Google Drawings I’ve been using Google Drawings a lot recently, because of the ease of collaboration and the ability to …

These are just links to fun things. Fold’NFly is a database of paper airplane designs. Rocket is a Mac app that makes it as easy as in Slack to add emoji in any app. 🚀!

Gary Bernhardt’s Boundaries talk is one of my favorites. In it, he talks about a “functional core” of pure, easily-testable code, surrounded by an “imperative shell” which deals with the messy world outside. It can be delightful to write code in this way: Part of the time, you’re …

Escaping the Technical Debt Cycle A talk by Michael Feathers: Escaping the Technical Debt Cycle In the talk, he urges against most numeric metrics. He praises the Open/Closed Principle as one important way to avoid adding unhealthy debt: In object-oriented programming, the open/closed principle states “software …

GraphQL Best Practices Shopify has posted a tutorial about their GraphQL best practices. Apollo Apollo provides robust client and server implementations of GraphQL in JavaScript. Graphene Graphene is the Python GraphQL solution we use at Khan Academy. It doesn’t seem as advanced as Apollo Server. Backlinks …

Molten These days, server-side web development is largely about building APIs. Molten is a web framework built for web APIs on top of modern (Python 3.5+) idioms. Graphene As of September 2018, Khan Academy has been transitioning over to GraphQL APIs gradually over the course of the last year. We’ve been using …