Code Review 6: Bowling Kata, Erlang edition

I spent most of the past month interacting with the score server. The Armstrong book details two “stages” of distributed programming: running on two Erlang nodes on the same machine and running on two Erlang nodes on different machines.

First, I added some functionality to the server:

Helltime for October 11

Announcer: Now for quick hits and commentary on software development topics from around the web, the EIP web-ring brings you the stigmatized spawn of a refactory, MoffDub, and Helltime!

Battling a cold and lack of connectivity between physically-separated Erlang nodes, I bring you abbreviated Helltime.

• Uzelezz gives a two-part post on test principles, a good restatement and expansion upon Uncle Bob‘s advocacy of clean tests, something I have been trying to practice myself.
• A post on the MuleSoft blog gives a good introduction for why and when Kanban should be introduced, but the post dances around a basic issue: how do you determine the WIP limit?
• The official Google blog announces the inevitable, that they will soon be driving all of our cars. Hell no. I see first hand how software is written and I’ve meet a lot of the people who write it. In no way do I want these people involved in how many left turns I make into oncoming traffic.

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Helltime for October 4

Announcer: Now for quick hits and commentary on software development topics from around the web, the EIP web-ring brings you the stigmatized spawn of a refactory, MoffDub, and Helltime!

• Michael Stonebreaker beeps out a communication of the ACM on why Enterprisey shops aren’t biting at NoSQL. Three cited complaints are low ACIDity, low-level query language, and low (no) standardization. From what I understand, NoSQL and its cohorts have a shot at the latter two. ACID properties are a property of the database system, and some, like MongoDB, let you choose how consistent you want to be (at the expense of other guarantees).
• Omar Al Zabir thinks that my shop breaks one of the ten commandments of caching: caching configuration settings. Indeed, most of our configuration settings, be them Spring properties or the legacy route, are loaded once per JVM, and any change to them requires a server restart. We even had a production issue that was solved by a mere restart. It’s no joke.
• Matthew of “You The User” embodies the Peter Principle with gems like this:
  

  If you aren’t being challenged in your job – leave.

  If you aren’t sweating it at present and feeling under pressure – leave.

  If you think you understand everything that you are doing where you are currently working – leave.

  More shocking is that nobody in the comments section has brought this up. If the comments section lacks the obvious – leave.

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