Articles by Aaron Harpole
Approaching Gender in Software Products
It is a delight to use software that seems to really ‘get’ you as a person! To achieve this, it requires that the software has been built by people who sought out to understand their users. When software isn’t built with its users in mind, it has the potential to leave its users feeling alienated. …
Idea: GenServers with Map-based state
I recently gave a talk at Empex LA in which I talked about my desire to see simplifications and enhancements to using some of the OTP behaviors offered in Elixir. In this post I’m going to explore a simple improvement to the GenServer API that would make it a little easier to work with. GenServers …
Channeled Procrastination
I procrastinate. In high school it was a huge issue for me, because as a high schooler I was still inexperienced at it. I frequently found myself in last-minute mode, moving swiftly from one self-induced crisis to another. College wasn’t any better. The assignments were more spread out, but the due dates tended to be …
Problematic Terminology in Open-Source
It remains a common practice in database systems today to refer to configurations where one database is a source of truth, and another database is a replica that follows the state of the source of truth database as a “master/slave” configuration. Use of this term is problematic. It references slavery to convey meaning about the …
Minimum Viable Process
If I mention the word “agile” to you, a couple of rituals common to agile methodologies probably come to mind. Daily stand-ups and iteration planning probably top the list, and you probably think of other agile concepts like user stories and estimating their complexity with an arbitrary number of points.