“Make code ignorable” is one of the first pieces of advice I ever received in a code review (thank you, Jeff). It’s also advice backed up by brain science, and a pattern that greatly increases the maintainability of our code. What does it mean to “make code ignorable”? Making code ignorable means preventing any unnecessary parsing of code…

It’s hard to find code that doesn’t use shortened variable names. Developers often use e instead of error, tx instead of transaction, and ctl instead of control. When we first began programming computers, shorter variables names were used in order to save computer memory. Memory was relatively limited in the…

Establishing and adhering to conventions may not seem like a revelatory suggestion for your codebase, but the frequency with which we fail to adhere to them suggests we may not understand just how important conventions are. If we don’t adhere to them, conventions become meaningless. …

We’ve discussed the importance of establishing and adhering to conventions, whether that be file structures or code style. While establishing a convention at all is generally more important than what that convention actually is, brain science can provide some guidance on what conventions are most helpful. One trait of a…

When someone refers to a database as “vertical” or “horizontal” they are referring to the type of data structure a database uses to store data. What is a horizontal database? This type of database is more common, and the type you’re probably familiar with. A User table for a horizontal database might look like this: …

What is an interface? The dictionary definition of an interface, as defined by Merriam-Webster, is "the place at which independent and often unrelated systems meet and act on or communicate with each other". In Go, an interface is a definition of behaviour. This definition is independent of any type (such as string), and is…

SQL injection is one of the most common security vulnerabilities in software. In 2017, The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) listed injection as the number one security risk to web applications. …