Plurrrr

When writing asynchronous code using Swift’s new built-in concurrency system, creating a Task gives us access to a new asynchronous context, in which we’re free to call async-marked APIs, and to perform work in the background.

But besides enabling us to encapsulate a piece of asynchronous code, the Task type also lets us control the way that such code is run, managed, and potentially cancelled.

The Memory Image Pattern (MIP) is a novel approach to application development. It rejects the idea of storing state in a database and gains both developer productivity and run-time performance. If you can fit your application data in memory, MIP might be for you.

A couple of years ago I wrote a somewhat controversial article on the topic of Bringing the Unix Philosophy to the 21st Century by adding a JSON output option to CLI tools. This allows easier parsing in scripts by using JSON parsing tools like jq, jello, jp, etc. without arcane awk, sed, cut, tr, reverse, etc. incantations.

It was controversial because there seem to be a lot of folks who don’t think writing bespoke parsers for each task is a big deal. Others think JSON is evil. There are strong feelings as can be seen in response to the article in the comments and also on Hacker News and Reddit.