Sometimes doing the right thing is still not the right thing

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 10:14:00 +0000

Tentatively subtitled: “How scale can make fools of us all”

This is going to be a real life war story…cause I haven’t done one of those in a while, and this particular case really ticked me off. Here’s the scoop: I’ve got a “service” which is called by other parts of the system. And by “service” I don’t mean something running in its own process and waiting for SOAP/REST requests or messages, I simply mean something that has a defined entry point (a static method in this case), where you pass in some data, and get something back.

The evolution of design, and the continued search for "The Way"

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 20:53:00 +0000

I’m currently finding myself in the midst of an evolutionary change. And I’m not talking about my super-human mutant powers, I’m talking about the way I’m thinking about solving a specific set of problems.

Let’s start with a sample….Lets take something like processing credit-cards as a benign and IP free place to start. As a subject that I really have no practical experience with, it seems like an appropriate choice. I’m going to assume that there are different rules for doing checksum validation on credit card numbers, depending on what the card is (Mastercard/Visa/Discover/etc). Now, here is evolutionary step 1: Use a basic case statement to process the various cards. Here is what something like that would look like:

Ioc on Dr. Random

Sometimes doing the right thing is still not the right thing

The evolution of design, and the continued search for "The Way"