blog.8-p.info

My wife and I were into board games in, I think 2015. We were pretty new to Seattle. We met a lot of people at that time. A few played board games with us and we were hooked. We went Mox in Seattle and Sugorokuya in Tokyo. We read After School Dice Club. We bought a few games.

But then, after having kids, these games had been collecting dusts.

Fast forward to maybe last week, I played a few games with my daughter. She was fine about basics and apparently enjoyed the games. We played a few this week as well.

While she of course needs some hand-holding, I feel that I’m hitting a milestone. A milestone to say that we could enjoy what we have enjoyed again, this time with our kids!

Dave Cheney has written that already;

Let’s start with the easiest one. Nobody needs a warning log level.

And I do agree with him. Don’t log warnings.

Warnings show your uncertainty. Uncertainty regarding the behavior of your system. This state could be bad, or maybe not.

Instead of sharing your feeling by logging that, you should ask your team and figure out whether this is really bad or not. Assuming your system is running ²⁴⁄₇. Log messages should be written for your teammate who is figuring out a production issue at 2am.

Sharing your uncertainty with your teammate is totally fine, but don’t do that in midnight. Do that in work hours.

Branching in Git (or any version control systems) is pretty easy, but merging the branch into the original branch is sometimes hard. As you keep the branch longer, merging that is becoming more difficult. You would have a lot of merge conflicts. Your team may become nervous about refactoring because of possible conflicts.

In some sense, a branch, especially longer-lived one could become a technical debt. It looks easier in the beginning, but you would pay the cost of branching someday. It is like paying off credit card debt, of course with interest charges.

Nowadays I simply avoid making longer-lived branches. I still make a local, personal branch for development, but I merge that as soon as I can. Trunk-based development with flags is much less painful than fixing all merge conflicts at the end of a sprint.

Martin Fowler says…

Martin Fowler has written Patterns for Managing Source Code Branches in May 2020. This article is really long and I haven’t read the whole honestly speaking. However the bottom line sounds similar to what I’ve written here.

As I said at the beginning of this long piece: branching is easy, merging is harder. Branching is a powerful technique, but it makes me think of goto statements, global variables, and locks for concurrency. Powerful, easy to use, but easier to over-use, too often they become traps for the unwary and inexperienced. Source code control systems can help to control branching by carefully tracking changes, but in the end they can only act as witnesses to the problems.

So, be careful and avoid if you can.

Sony RX-100 IV

In August 2017, right before a family trip to Mexico, I bought this camera at the used section of Glazer’s Camera in Seattle. This is my primary camera these days due to its portability.

I’ve just attached the Nikon strap yesterday, to use the camera more often.

Nikon D3100

Before the RX-100, I was using Nikon D3100 primarily. I bought this camera in 2010. I was still in Japan at that time. The additional lens on the picture above is AF-S DX Nikkor 35mm f/1.8G.

While it is bulky, I still like the camera. Or I would say that the bulkiness is the feature because it fits my hands well than smaller cameras.

This is my 50th post of #100DaysToOffload challenge. I have reached 50%! Based on the number of the days I spent to write these 50 posts, writing 100 posts in a year seems achievable.

A few Japanese developers I know also (re)started blogging and/or writing more frequently, which is pretty cool.

• portal shit!
• r7kamura.com
• A Day in the Life
• ngym.org

Less Rants?

I think I have written more about stuff I like, which is good! I don’t say being critical is bad (ranting is bad). But I don’t want to be a critic here.

More Pictures!

For the next 10 posts, I’d like to have more pictures on this blog. I have serious/real cameras, but haven’t used them much nowadays. This is certainly inspired by A Day in the Life.