Codbix No.5

Welcome to Issue #5 of The Codbix! This week: Learn how to build tools, Things we Wished More Developers Knew About Databases, and The Italian Town That Built Its Own Sun.


Learn how to build tools

Our jobs and lives are full of repetition, and one of the beauties of being developers is that we can take steps to automate away some of the repetition.

Learning to automate, or at least minimise, repetition optimises your work. You can get your tools or boilerplate code out of the way, and focus your work’s unique benefits. Aside from automating the task at hand, removing repetition has a tonne of other benefits.

Learn how to make small changes to make you more efficient.

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Things I Wished More Developers Knew About Databases

A large majority of computer systems have some state and are likely to depend on a storage system. My knowledge on databases accumulated over time, but along the way our design mistakes caused data loss and outages. In data-heavy systems, databases are at the core of system design goals and tradeoffs. Even though it is impossible to ignore how databases work, the problems that application developers foresee and experience will often be just the tip of the iceberg.

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Driver.js

A light-weight, no-dependency, vanilla JavaScript engine to drive the user’s focus across the page

Website, Github


Cut out everything that’s not surprising.

So my main advice to anyone preparing to give a talk on stage is to cut out everything from your talk that’s not surprising. (Nobody has ever complained that a talk was too short.)

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The Italian Town That Built Its Own Sun

Surrounded by mountains and left in the dark for three months a year, a town in northern Italy has found a creative solution to its sunlight problem.

Image from Vice

Image from Vice

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