Input/Output Redirection in the Shell

Delve deep into stdout, stderr, and pipes plus some neat tricks that you might not know.

Building a prototype? Bring some rope.

April 9, 2009

While scanning through Allison’s copy of Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services, I came across this nugget.

The problem with software prototypes
It seems to be widely understood that industrial design and mechanical engineering prototypes—from paperclips and tape to polished appearance models—are disposable learning tools. Prototyping is clearly distinct from manufacturing, so it would be ludicrous to think that even a late-stage prototype could be reused as part of the final product. In software, however, the tools used for anything other than paper prototyping are generally the same tools used for “manufacturing” (i.e., writing production code). For this reason, many stakeholders can’t see why a detailed prototype that appears functional is still many months away from completion.

It immediately reminded me of a few posts that I had written about three years ago on the topic of developing prototypes and NOT keeping them.

The author continues with…

It’s important to educate stakeholders that prototype code is kind of like the illusion of automatic doors on Star Trek—it looks like it’s working, but it’s really a guy standing behind the wall pulling a rope.

I completely agree that education is the most important aspect to managing client expectations. With regard to the amount of work that you put into a prototype, we need to be careful on how much time and energy is put into them. If we can get away with a guy (or some quick Javascript hacks) to demonstrate possible functionality, make sure we aren’t using much more than rope. Rope is cheap. Prototypes should be too.

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How to Evaluate Your Rails JSON API for Performance Improvements

February 10, 2014

Let's say your company's product is a mobile app that gets its data from an internal JSON API. The API, built using Rails, is a few years old. Response objects are large, request latency is high, and your data indicates mobile users aren’t converting because of it.

It can be tempting to immediately dig into your code and look for N+1 queries to refactor. But if you have the time and bandwidth, try to view this as a great opportunity to take a step back and rethink the high-level requirements for your JSON API. Starting with a conversation about the desired functionality of each endpoint will help keep your team's efforts focused on delivering no more than is required by the client, as efficiently as possible.

Grab your team for a whiteboarding session and review your assumptions about the behavior of each API endpoint...

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