Engineering on Thomas Cothran

The Ocelot Game

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The ocelot game works like this: a developer has written a feature, and presents it to an ocelot.

Not a real ocelot. Ocelots are playful. But they’re wild animals. Their claws easily poke holes in things. We want to poke holes in code.

The ocelot is a role played by a developer who tries to poke holes in another developer’s code. Specifically, they try to change the code in such a way that the feature breaks while still passing the unit tests.

MPAs vs SPAs: The False Dichotomy

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is the second post in the series “Have Clojure UIs Taken the Wrong Path?”. The first post is here.

How do we choose between building an application using a hypermedia approach versus the client-side SPA? This post won’t answer that question. But it will say how not to make that choice.

A common heuristic is the spectrum that stretches between old fashioned “Multi Page Apps” (MPAs) for basic use cases, to Single Page Applications for rich client interactivity.

Have Clojure UIs Taken the Wrong Path? Part 1

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Clojure community has focused on React-based solutions for complex front-end clients such as Reagent, Rum, Om, Re-frame, and Fulcro.

For all their differences, they follow a very similar architecture, making heavy use of client-side state and using RPC for client-server communication. We will call this the “React+” approach.

But is this the right choice?

I will suggest the answer may be negative. My suspicion is that as web UI libraries advance, the problems they solve are not essential. Rather, the problems are accidental; they are generated by the React+ architecture.