nous

You lose information when DST kicks in - which is not great. It is trivial to convert to any timezone so there is little point in logging in anything but UTC and keeps everything consistent. Especially when comparing dates from servers in different timezones.

So, if you just use the system API, then this means logging with syslog(3). Learn how to use it.

This is old advice. These days just log to stdout, no need for your process to understand syslog, systemd, containers and modern systems just capture stdout and forward that where it needs to do. Then all applications can be simple and it us up to the system to handle them in a consistent way.

NOTICE level: this will certainly be the level at which the program will run when in production

I have never see anyone use this log level ever. Most use or default to Info or Warn. Even the author later says

I run my server code at level INFO usually, but my desktop programs run at level DEBUG.

If your message uses a special charset or even UTF-8, it might not render correctly at the end, but worst it could be corrupted in transit and become unreadable.

I don't know if this is true anymore. UTF-8 is ubiquitous these days and I would be surprised if any logging system could not handle it, or at least any modern one. I am very tempted to start adding some emoji to my logs to find out though.

User 54543 successfully registered e-mail user@domain.com

Now that is a big no no. Never ever log PII data if you don't want a world of hurt later on.

2013-01-12 17:49:37,656 [T1] INFO c.d.g.UserRequest User plays {'user':1334563, 'card':'4 of spade', 'game':23425656}

I do not like that at all. The message should not contain json. Most logging libraries let you add context in a consistent way and can output the whole log line in Json. Having escaped json in json because you decided to add json manually is a pain, just use the tools you are given properly.

Add timestamps either in UTC or local time plus offset

Never log in local time. DST fucks shit up when you do that. Use UTC for everything and convert when displayed if needed, but always store dates in UTC.

Think of Your Audience

Very much this. I have seen far too many error message that give fuck all context to the problem and require diving through source code to figure out the hell went wrong. Think about how logs will be read without the context of the source code at hand.

The first actual sentence in the article clears that up.

Schools will be told not to teach children any form of sex education until year 5, when pupils are aged nine, according to reports, with some topics being delayed until pupils are 13.

Though that could have been the title and tagline...

(I don't know why jamstack has taken over that site, but the list itself seems to be intact.)

Not really taken over, more just a rebranding. Both are owned by netlify, started off as a list of static site generators you could use with netlify (aka all of them they could find) but then they just rebranded the site and gave it a fancy name like you have with all the other web stacks you have these days.

It is a digital signage display (ie in store ads, menus, displays etc) - not meant for desktop use.

Whatever language you chose you might want to also look at the htmx JS library. It lets you write in your html snippets better interactivity without actually needing to write JS. It basically lets you do things like when you click on an element, it can make a request to your server and replace some other element with the contents your server responds with - all with attributes on HTML tags instead of writing JS. This lets you keep all the state on the backend and lets you write more backend logic without only relying on full page refreshes to update small sections of the page.

For a backend language I would use rust as that is what I am most familiar with now and enjoy using the most. Most languages are adequate at serving backend code though so it is hard to go wrong with anything that you enjoy using. Though with rust I tend to find I have fewer issues when I deploy something as appose to other languages which can cause all sorts of runtime errors as they let you ignore the error paths by default.

Yup, and that is because people only ever lean DRY coding by its name. It is never really what it originally meant, when to use it and more importantly when not to use it. So loads of people apply it religiously and over use it. This is true of all the popular catchy named methodologies/principals etc.

Yup, this is part of what’s lead me to advocate for SRP (the single responsibility principle).

Even that gets overused and abused. My big problem with it is what is a single responsibility. It is poorly defined and leads to people thinking that the smallest possible thing is one responsibility. But when people think like that they create thousands of one to three line functions which just ends up losing the what the program is trying to do. Following logic through deeply nested function calls IMO is just as bad if not worst than having everything in a single function.

There is a nice middle ground where SRP makes sense but like all patterns they never talk about where that line is. Overuse of any pattern, methodology or principle is a bad thing and it is very easy to do if you don't think about what it is trying to achieve and when applying it no longer fits that goal.

Basically, everything in moderation and never lean on a single thing.

Refactoring should not be a separate task that a boss can deny. You need to do feature X, feature X benefits from reworking some abstraction a bit, then you rework that abstraction before starting on feature X. And then maybe refactor a bit more after feature X now you know what it looks like. None of that should take substantially longer, and saves vast amounts of time later on if you don't include it as part of the feature work.

You can occasionally squeeze in a feature without reworking things first if time for something is tight, but you will run into problems if you do this too often and start thinking refactoring is a separate task to feature work.

“Best practices” might help you to avoid writing worse code.

TBH I am not sure about this. I have seen many "Best practices" make code worst not better. Not because the rules themselves are bad but people take them as religious gospel and apply them to every situation in hopes of making their code better without actually looking at if it is making their code better.

For instance I see this a lot in DRY code. While the rules themselves are useful to know and apply they are too easily over applied removing any benefit they originally gave and result in overly abstract code. The number of times I have added duplication back into code to remove a layer of abstraction that was not working only to maybe reapply it in a different way, often keeping some duplication.

Suddenly requirements change and now it’s bad code.

This only leads to bad code when people get to afraid to refactor things in light of the new requirements.Which sadly happens far to often. People seem to like to keep what was there already and follow existing patterns even well after they are no longer suitable. I have made quite a lot of bad code better by just ripping out the old patterns and putting back something that better fits the current requirements - quite often in code I have written before and others have added to over time.

How do we know these are the AI chatbots instructions and not just instructions it made up? They make things up all the time, why do we trust it in this instance?

There is a small "print this book" link in the top corner next to the github link that can save as a PDF. Might not give you the nicest page layout but hell, it is free. And free to read online, and free to read offline with rustup docs --book.