You know you are working at a startup when...

... pretty much every big company downtown is closed due to the snow, but it's just another day at the office for you.

Things look quiet on the Querki front right now, mostly because I'm engaged in a gigantic refactor of the entire system. The brief summary is that I've come to realized that I have so many cyclic dependencies that every change is forcing me to recompile the entire world. Each recompile is *reasonably* fast, but now that it's over 100 files that is still a minute or so, dozens of times a day, and that's adding up. It was dumb of me to let it get to this point, and so I'm doing what I always do, and rebuilding the system using The Ecology Pattern, my personal favorite version of a dependency-injection framework, which I have used on essentially every major project for the past 15 years. Not sure offhand whether I've ever described that architecture here -- at some point, I'll write it up. (I highly recommend it -- I originally got the design from Tom Leonard at Looking Glass, who crafted it to cope with the peculiarities of large-scale programming in C++, but it turns out to be a good approach for almost any "conventional" large-scale program, regardless of platform or language.)

Hope everyone is managing to stay safe and warm...

The Ecology Pattern [LONG]

[This one is strictly for the programmers.]

As mentioned this morning, I spent the day reimplementing the Ecology Pattern, my preferred way to manage dependency injection in my programs. It's a tried and true pattern that I've been using for a solid 15 years now. I first learned it from Tom Leonard, my boss at both Looking Glass and Buzzpad -- he had evolved it to keep Dependency Hell at bay in C++/COM applications, but I quickly found that it's almost always appropriate for programs that are of more-than-modest size. It isn't necessarily the One True Answer to dependency injection, but I find that it consistently works well, and frankly, it's easy enough that I find it usually better to just reroll it for each application, instead of using a canned library.
( This gets pretty long, but may be interesting to engineers )