Bobby Fischer, the eleventh World Chess Champion, was one of the best chess players of the last century. Did you know that, along with anti-Semitic statements, he also said that women chess players “aren’t creative and are all fish”? Did you also know that he publicly described the 9/11 events as “wonderful news”?

Are you a Ruby developer? If you are, I’m pretty sure you have a very vague idea of what concurrency and thread safety are. No offense, but this is what I’ve figured out after dealing with Ruby code and speaking with Ruby programmers over the last half a year. I’ve been writing in Ruby pretty actively recently and I do like the language and the ecosystem around it. Zold, the experimental cryptocurrency we are creating, is written almost entirely in Ruby. What does that tell you? I like Ruby. But when it comes to concurrency, there are blank spots. Big time.

There are other products doing something similar, including MailChimp, AWeber, and many others. They are great. Maybe. I don’t really know. I tried some of them, some time ago. And I was frustrated. They are expensive, clumsy, and heavy. That’s my experience. I wanted something lightweight, where I can upload a list of emails, create a simple HTML/text letter, configure my SMTP outbound server, and call it a day. I spent a few days and created Mailanes. It’s free (for all of you), it’s simple, and it’s open source.

It’s Sunday. I’m at home, drinking tea and writing a new document for one of our future investors. One of my contacts in Telegram all of a sudden shoots me a message. I haven’t talked to this guy for at least two months. He is a software developer. I know him because he works at Zerocracy. His name is Paul.

I was explaining how Zerocracy works to one of our prospective clients yesterday. He texted me today: “[At Zerocracy] there is no commitment and anybody is free to leave any time, so the risk of entrusting a highly important project to such a platform and failing to deliver it on time is very high. We will develop it on our own with hired developers who will have salaries, and I’ll be architect and project manager, that way it will be under our entire control.” I think this word “control” he used deserves a comment.

Objects talk to each other via their methods. In mainstream programming languages, like Java or C#, an object may have a unique set of methods together with some methods it is forced to have because it implements certain types, also known as interfaces. My experience of speaking with many programmers tells me that most of us are pretty scared of objects that implement too many interface methods. We don’t want to deal with them since they are polymorphic and, because of that, unreliable. It’s a fair fear. Let’s try to analyze where it comes from.

There is a famous book by Robert Martin called Clean Code. The title is an obvious call to all of us: the code must be clean. Clean, like a kitchen, I suppose—there are no dirty dishes, no garbage on the floor, no smelly towels. Dirt to be cleaned in a code base, according to Martin, includes large methods, non-descriptive variable names, tight coupling, lack of SOLID and SRP compliance, and many other things. Read the book, it’s worth it. However, there is yet another aspect of source code. How clear is it?

We all keep our code in Git version control repositories. The question is whether we should create a new repository for each new module or try to keep as much as possible in a single so called “monolithic” repo. Market leaders, like Facebook and Google, advocate the second approach. I believe they are wrong.

There are tech skills and there are soft skills. Every programmer knows that. Tech skills are about algorithms, operators, classes, objects, and everything else they teach us in tech schools. Soft skills are about something else. What exactly? Difficult to say. Let’s try to clear the air.

Here is a simple principle for naming methods in OOP, which I’m trying to follow in my code: it’s a verb if it manipulates, it’s a noun if it builds. That’s it. Nothing in between. Methods like saveFile() or getTitle() don’t fit and must be renamed and refactored. Moreover, methods that “manipulate” must always return void, for example print() or save(). Let me explain.

A few days ago, a friend of mine asked me to join him in a new startup. He said that he needed a partner, to help him partially finance the project, promote it, bring in new ideas, and push the business forward. I liked the business idea and wanted to participate. I started to ask questions about our future partnership and attempted to draw a simple partnership agreement. He quickly got offended. He said that he was looking for a real partner, who would share his goals and would never require any papers or lawyers.

Here is how it goes, over and over again. I find a new developer for one of my projects managed by Zerocracy. He claims to be an expert with 10 years of hands-on coding experience, $60 hourly rate (we don’t hire US guys), and fluent English. Then he joins the project and attempts to close a few tickets. But he hardly can. For many reasons. Then he comes back and explains why our microtasking methodology doesn’t work, trying to convince me that I have to pay him per hour, instead of per result. Here is my answer.

Only lazy people haven’t written already about how global variables are evil. It started in 1973 when W. Wulf et al. claimed that “the non-local variable is a major contributing factor in programs which are difficult to understand.” Since then, many other reasons where suggested to convince programmers to stop using global variables. I think I read them all, but didn’t find the one that bothers me most of all: composability. In a nutshell, global variables make code difficult or impossible to compose in ways which are different from what its original author expected.

Over twenty five years ago, in 1992, at an OOPSLA workshop in Vancouver, Kent Beck, in answer to the question “What is an architect?” said, according to Philippe Kruchten, that it is “a new pompous title that programmers demand to have on their business cards to justify their sumptuous emoluments.” Not much has changed since then. There is a big difference between a smart programmer and a project architect. Here is a list of traits that, I believe, a good architect has.

You know what OAuth login is, right? It’s when your users click “login” and get redirected to Facebook, Twitter, Google, or some other website which then identifies them. Then they go back to your website and you know who they are. It’s very convenient for them. It’s convenient for you too, since you don’t need to implement the login functionality and don’t need to keep their credentials in a database. I created a simple Ruby gem to simplify this operation for GitHub only. Here is how it works.