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12 Dec 2021

Few notes on Strange Loop 2021

This year's Strange Loop was my 4th and it was as good as it has been in the past. One of the main reason I like to go to conferences especially Strange Loop was to see beyond the state of the art transmittable knowledge, which is the untransimittable one. In this age of Google search, Stack Overflow copy/paste and Coding school driven programming, which has its own place in our industry, we need to be cognizant of the existence and importance of the untransimittable part of software engineering knowledge that can only be acquired by learning from the masters. And Strange Loop has never failed me so far to provide an opportunity to jolt my brain to find easier those tacit knowledge that otherwise might have taken me long winding road to acquire. I would like to present few of those that I have taken notes so it will help my aspiring fellow engineers.

Domain Driven Design : There are numerous books/posts/videos about how to do it right and I have been using it with success for the last few years. However, I have always been little bit unclear about how I measure its benefit within my engineering team. I got the `AHA` moment when second day keynote put up a quote on its slide stating that 'Small change in product (Domain), should result in small change in the code (implementation)'. Now, I know how to measure if we are doing it right or wrong in my team.

API Design : There is a talk about using Rust's type system in aiding you to design a robust API that does validation and error reporting right. While that talk focus on how Rust type system is tremendously useful to library (API) designer, what I see from that talk is way beyond just helpfulness of a well designed type system, which is a languages ability to allow you to specify your system's interfaces exactly as you intended. If you are not using one of those languages (Rust, F#, Ada and Clojure … any language that allows you specify interfaces) in your library/API work, you should be checking them out to see what you are missing (also remember to keep an eye for what you are loosing. It is all about trade offs).

Dependencies : This is a topic that is very dear to day to day practice considering my current preferred tool of choice (Clojure and ClojureScript). The branchstack talk triggered sort of `AHA` moment for me in treating the entire state of your system (code) vs the state of your outside dependencies. I'd like to think of them as your internal state vs external state. I have been advocating and practicing a sort of convention your system should only be just three steps away from being able to be worked upon, which is:

git clone <your_system_x> && make deps && make run

Note that it does not have to be git and make. Any tool of your choice will do. The idea is that as a project owner, it is your responsibility to make sure that your system workflow is easily reproducible and those tools should be treated as first class citizen as your system logic code.

Again, those kind of tacit knowledge can only be learned by being in the presence of crafts people and having actually conversation with them in close vicinity. I have enjoyed all the talks that I attended and even more so the hallway and lunch table conversation. And I am looking forward to Strange Loop 2022 already :).

Tags: conference strange-loop