Small programming tricks

In one line

A lot of effective engineering comes from the accumulation of small nuggets of knowledge.

Opening excerpt

Day to day, I think a surprising amount of engineering productivity comes from small nuggets of knowledge: being aware that a language feature exists; knowing that an unexplained tcp delay is probably related to the TCP_NO_DELAY setting and Nagle’s algorithm; knowing the right git incantation to get out of a pickle; or knowing a trick with sed to rewrite a file.

In one sense, this is self-evident: anything you know is going to be made up of smaller pieces of knowledge. Of course those smaller pieces of knowledge matter.

But I think there are some nuggets of knowledge that are particularly valuable and don’t require a lot of supporting mental infrastructure. You don’t need to know any python to use python3 -m http.server to start a simple server in a directory, but it might still make your work marginally easier. Let me share a few examples:

const bucket = Math. floor (Math. log10 ( userInGroupCount )) metrics . increment ( “my_metric” , { bucket }); Modern JS now supports Array.flatMap , Object.entries , and Promise.withResolvers .

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