Monthly Grinder
Welcome to the very third entry into this splendid series, within which we present the condensed wisdom of our company’s finest developers and other sorts of ne’er-do-wells.
…and with an abrupt transition into gastronomical metaphors, today’s specials are the following:
- Excel has long been the most popular “programming language” for business applications, even though it’s not very good at it. PowerFx is a new attempt at creating real-world programs with the simplicity of Excel.
- JPAstreamer lets you represent DB queries as data streams with a simple builder API. They’re only a decade late to the party, but hey, better than never.
- Slide-out buttons look cool, but not something you’d want to do from scratch. So here’s an interactive code snippet you can steal instead.
- Mind maps are an attempt to make the dreary hierarchical to-do list fun and colorful again! If this is the sort of thing you’re into, check out Coggle.
- Best practices considered harmful. Or rather, the eagerness with which people will go from “well, it seemed like a decent enough idea for our use case” to “universal best practice” is harmful.
- In SQL Server, if you have random spikes in your response times, check if you have AUTO_UPDATE_STATISTICS_ASYNC turned on. By default, statistics are updated synchronously before the request triggering the auto-update, which for larger tables, can take quite a while. Usually you don’t care if the statistics are slightly outdated - and if you do, you can trigger it manually anyway.
- And more on the topic of “why in the hell is this disabled by default?”, meet the Query Store. You automatically get historical runtime statistics for every query executed in the DB with minimal overhead, which is super helpful for data-driven optimization and after-the-fact debugging of performance issues.
- If you want to use Docker Compose without the Docker part, Podman now supports that, too. Hooray for boring but useful software.
- If sacrificing privacy on the altar of potentially higher advertising profits sounds great to you, Google’s FLoC should be right up your alley! (If that sounds bitter and cynical: Good.)
- Mind-altering link of the month: The thirty-million line problem. The main idea is this: with tons of more code being required to do anything, achieving performance and security is harder than ever. You could get rid of a lot of that code by eliminating the need for an OS and device drivers, by using a stable ISA for the entire system. While that sounds crazy and overly restrictive, for CPUs we’ve had that for 40 years, and x86 isn’t about to disappear anytime soon.
That’s it for this time, see you next month!