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Link of the day

We talk all the time about how often code is read vs written and how important it is to be good at reading code, but I’ve hardly ever seen anyone talk about how to get good at reading code. This excellent slide deck by Josh Matthews called How to Read Unfamiliar Code is one of the only times I’ve ever seen anyone even address learning how to read unfamiliar code, and it has a great case study with a really clear step by step method for understanding a feature in an unfamiliar codebase. I recommend checking it out!

Link of the day

One of the hardest parts of programming is when you’re just starting out and don’t even know the word for what you want to google. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a list of all the words and phrases you needed to know to even ask an intelligible question? Of course it would be unspeakably boring to read but that’s beside the point :)

If you’re interested in functional programming, some fantastic person did make a list of at least some of the terms you’ll need to know. It’s a work in progress and I would be surprised if it was even possible to make a list of every single term you’ll ever need to know for functional programming, but there’s still a lot of good stuff in there. Even if you’re not currently doing any functional programming I think it’s interesting to know what’s going on in there.

Link of the day: Queues Don’t Fix Overload

I really enjoyed this post about how Queues Don’t Fix Overload, it does a great job of explaining why bolting something onto your application without digging into the root cause of your problems will just make things worse in the long run.

Bonus link: I found that post in the Programming Beyond Practices newsletter by Gregory Brown, which I also recommend. Have a look at the archives, there’s some good stuff in there.