The truth is, I’m the luckiest person in the world today. I hope you are too.

Happy holidays! You should read one of my favourite Daring Fireball posts.

A decently-sized chunk of my time at my job was spent working on platform integration projects with the other teams across functions and time zones. From those projects, one thing that jumps out to me as my biggest takeaway is learning to be a defensive programmer. I'm not good at it yet, but I'm trying. The points below are not completely mutually exclusive, but I’ve tried my best to separate the core ideas.

You're an interface...

... and as an interface, it is your responsibility to be able to accept (and deal with) invalid input but always return valid output. My first mentor at this gig, Ali-Akber Saifee used to call this is his guiding principle. Whenever we designed APIs, or defined behavior of any description or built architectures for new projects, this thought was my gospel.

Design by contract

Interaction and integration with other modules, services and teams was the quintessence of my job as a backend/platform engineer. This made designing by contract very important to the way I worked.

Assume everyone is going to break the contract eventually. When that happens, hope that you followed the interface rule above and are able to deal with that scenario.

Cover your butt

Make sure you've done everything in your power to make sure that when 💩 hits the fan, and it will, you can prove that the fault wasn't in your work. This may sound... unpleasant or even nasty at first, but humour me. This translates to having the necessary guards against and logging of bad input or pre/post-condition violations etc. Not only does this make debugging easier for you, by proving that your system wasn’t at fault, it also makes debugging easier for the external components/teams you’re working with.

Test whatever you can

Be it unit, integration, functional, behavioral, factorial, or foobarial. Make sure there are systems in place to inform you or someone else is when regressions are introduced.

Document your work

Assume that when things break, you'll be on vacation on a beach or hill somewhere where internet access isn't an option. When that happens, assuming your bus factor was 1 (which it ideally shouldn’t be), someone else should be able to step in, and without too much* effort, be able to find out what is wrong. If you did cover your butt, then said person would be able to point out which interacting system was at fault. If, for whatever reason, it was your component, then said person should also be able to follow your documentation and fix the problem.

*your mileage may vary

While being defensive usually has negative connotations in life, deploying it as a programmer, I’ve found it to be quite helpful.

This week’s recommendation is “Live Forever” by Oasis. This, along with Don’t Look Back in Anger are my favourite Oasis songs.

PS - This is the 52nd post in this series, and probably the last for a while. I hope to post other things on here, but we’ll see how that goes.

This week’s recommendation is “Don’t Look Back in Anger” by Oasis. A large chunk of Oasis fans will tell you that this was their best work, and that is very difficult to argue against.

My personal favourite rendition of this song was performed by the band at the River Plate Stadium soon before Noel Gallagher left Oasis.

This is a day late, but this week’s recommendation is “Little By Little” by Oasis. Oasis is my favourite band, and since we have 3 weeks to go till the one year anniversary of Music Mondays, I’m going to recommend three of my favourite Oasis songs. First up, is Little By Little. This is only of the songs that has Noel Gallagher on the lead vocals rather than his brother and regular vocalist, Liam.

My personal favourite rendition of this song is performed by Noel with his new band, Noel Gallager’s High Flying Birds

This week’s recommendation is “Wavin’ Flag” by K’naan. This was the one of the promotional songs for the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

This week’s recommendation is “Hey There Delilah” by Plain White T’s.

This week’s recommendation is “Space Oddity” by David Bowie ft Kirsten Wiig. This was the version of the song that appeared in the movie The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

This week’s recommendation is “Jeremy” by Pearl Jam.

This week’s recommendation is “At Least It Was Here” by The 88. This was the theme song for Community, which I recently binge-watched.

This week’s recommendation is “Friday I’m In Love” by The Black Keys.

This week’s recommendation is “Friday I’m In Love” by The Cure.

This week’s recommendation is “Summer of ’69” by Bryan Adams.

Bryan Adams was one of my favourite musicians growing up and his compilation album, “The Best of Me”, was one of the first albums I ever purchased.

This week’s recommendation is “Holding My Breath” by Airplane Mode.

Airplane Mode is a recently formed band started by Dave Wiskus and Joe Cieplinski. They’ve been talking about what it’s like to start a band over at their podcast. It’s a lot of fun to listen to and their music is something I’ve really enjoyed so far and expect it to only get better from here.

Listen to Holding My Breath on Spotify or Apple Music.

This week’s recommendation is “Absolution Calling” by Incubus.

A lot of my friends were really into Incubus during our teenage years. I didn’t get into them at all back then (or ever, really). In fact, I discovered this song on Apple Music and it is the first Incubus song I’ve liked.