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Derek Comartin

Stop using trivial Guard Clauses! Try this instead

Guard clauses, on the surface, sound like a great idea. They can reduce conditional complexity by exiting a method or function early. However, I find guard clauses used in the real world to be of little value. Often polluting application-level code for trivial preconditions. I will refactor some code to push those preconditions forcing the edge of your application so your domain focuses on real business concerns. YouTube Check out my YouTube channel, where I post all kinds of content accompanying my posts, including this video showing everything in this post. Null Checks The most common case of guard clauses is doing… Read More »Stop using trivial Guard Clauses! Try this instead

Do you want to use Kafka? Or do you need a Queue?

Do you want to use Kafka? Or do you need a message broker and queues? While they can seem similar, they have different purposes. I’m going to explain the differences, so you don’t try to brute force patterns and concepts in Kafka that are better used with a message broker. YouTube Check out my YouTube channel, where I post all kinds of content accompanying my posts, including this video showing everything in this post. Partitioned Log Kafka is a log. Specifically a partitioned log. I’ll discuss the partition part later in this post and how that affects ordered processing and concurrency. When… Read More »Do you want to use Kafka? Or do you need a Queue?

Just store UTC? Not so fast! Handling Time zones is complicated.

Should you store dates & times in your database as UTC? It’s pretty standard advice if you’re working in a system that needs to record dates and times from many different time zones. But this advice doesn’t hold true when dealing with dates and times in the future; here are some things you need to consider. YouTube Check out my YouTube channel, where I post all kinds of content accompanying my posts, including this video showing everything in this post. Just store UTC? Not really. You’ll hear/read pretty standard advice to store all dates/times as UTC when storing dates/times in a database.… Read More »Just store UTC? Not so fast! Handling Time zones is complicated.