Plurrrr

Sat 07 Jan 2023

A Brief Defense of XML

XML is precisely what it says on the tin: an extensible markup language. It’s a markup language with a completely uniform syntax so that the alphabet of markup elements is customizable. And for what it is, there is truly no replacement. Every other markup language supports only a limited set of markup directives defined from the factory. The tradeoff is generality for ease of authoring: limited markup languages can have terser syntax for specific elements.

Source: A Brief Defense of XML, an article by Fernando Borretti.

Logging practices I follow

There are many pitfall that can lead to useless, wasteful and confusing logs. Therefore I follow a specific set of practices which allows me to write better logs while also being consistent across the system.

You should remmember that logging is for the developers, you are going to be the only one who’s reading them, so as you are about to log something, ask yourself this:

  • Is this log really needed? does it rely important information I couldn’t get from the other logs in the same flow?
  • Am I going to log an object that can be huge on production? If so, can I just log a few metrics of that objects instead? for example, it’s length, or handpick a few important attribute to log.
  • Does the information I am about to log will help me to debug/understand the flow?

Source: Logging practices I follow, an article by Eliran Turgeman.

The Snowman (2017)

Detective Harry Hole investigates the disappearance of a woman whose scarf is found wrapped around an ominous-looking snowman.

In the evening Esme and I watched The Snowman. The movie is based on a book by Jo Nesbø which I read several years ago. I liked the movie, although it was a bit slow, and give it a 7 out of 10.