Reading code is the most important activity of a computer programmer. Ideally the code is then interpreted and ran as a thought experiment inside the programmer’s brain. This sounds hard, but as you learn an environment, the mind will eventually reach this level of tooling.

The ability to reason about code without running it, is the key to failing fast and often. Which you always want to do. Failing slow is painful. Just as Intellisense is a huge help for catching syntax errors early, not having to actually build & run your program, you can iterate much quicker.

Of course what happens if your internal transpiling mechanism and logic simulation units fail as you bite off more than your meat computer can handle?

Just press F5.

I recommend picking your favorite open source project and start reading. If you get stuck, just start dropping some breakpoints and calibrating your internal toolkit.

What happens when 2 identifiers or keys collide?  Bad stuff.  Databases originally used integers for their record identifiers.  If you wanted to add a new record you must query or ask database what was the last integer and add one to it.

This is fine in isolation, but what happens if you want to insert a bunch of records into a remote database that you can only connect to once per hour?  Oh and there are multiple users.  You can’t use Integers anymore you must use something like a UUID/GUID.

Globals Unique Identifiers (GUID) or Universally Unique Identifiers provide a “random” 128bit value that looks like the following:

https://sessionlink.herokuapp.com/?id=c42db039-ba38-4ce8-a5c0-c997894bcade

They work great, and once you switch from Integers to GUIDs your database is truly distributed and can be updated on the moon!  They are a bit ugly though.  Also they take a huge amount of storage compared to the 64 bits of an integer.  Data size matters sometimes.  Wait, GUIDs are 128 bits!

But still we have a slight probability of generating or guessing the same ID with the birthday problem.

If you are FAANG then you have to start worrying about stuff like this.  There will be collisions.  What happens if you add another GUID or two, increasing the bits to 512?

So there is still the GUID Soup to consider…  Start putting multiple GUIDs in an URL and it is pretty gross.

Enter CUID, which has some interesting objectives:

Collision-resistant ids optimized for horizontal scaling and binary search lookup performance.

How do they do this?  with a string 25 characters.  Timestamping is critical to its binary search capabilities.  Ordering by timestamp allows the lookup to be logarithmic.  So if you need to find one record in a billion.  It would take about 30 tries to find it.  Sorting is key to speed here.

If you need speed and no creation time privacy CUIDs may be a viable option.  Anonymous systems must never use CUIDs.

Only slightly larger in storage size than a GUID… 25 Characters * 8 Bits/Character = 200 Bits.  Guessing CUIDs I feel would be easier…

I’ll stick with my GUIDs soup for now.

Until Next Time. Happy Merging Distributed Datasets,

Rob

P.S. Microsoft trying to brand it, er recapitulate:

Creating software is easy, creating software that is sustainable to maintain and extend is hard.  There are not many mediums in which the consequences of a simple change or design decision can render the complete system useless.  The way in which the software is built is just as critical as to who is building it.

Honey why is the toilet flushing now when I flip the light switch?

Whoa! Cool! I didn’t realize changing the light bulb would do that.

Poorly designed systems are interconnected in ways that are not necessary.  It is often easier to write the prototype in this manner, but products often need to be refactored to use time tested design patterns.

If you ever find yourself scared to change something or can’t figure out how to add the next killer feature.  It is certainly time you reevaluate what you have and don’t be afraid to delete your code.   You may be surprised how much of it is no longer needed.

More code, more bugs!

Recommended Reading

So you think you are almost there. You think one or two more hacking sessions could “do it” and you start the weekend thrash.

What is the difference between a clever hack and an unmaintainable pit of tar?

If you are in the Zone, then you of course nothing can stop you.  But I say stop and rethink your life.  You probably are building the wrong thing anyway.

I don’t roll on Shabbos!