The notebook index
Earlier notes
Earlier reference notes remain available at their existing addresses. The current blog concentrates on programming languages, protocols and self-hosted software.
310 notes.
- Handling Feed Revisions in a Transit Schedule Cache
Keep fetched schedule versions identifiable, invalidate derived results according to their dependencies, and prevent searches from mixing revisions.
- What Should a Transit Search Log Record?
Structured search logs should capture timing, schedule revision, and failure class while avoiding unnecessary details that could expose a rider’s query or travel pattern.
- Building a Small Schedule Lookup Smoke Check
A lightweight smoke check should exercise a permitted public lookup, verify a usable response, and return a clear failure status without assuming an undocumented API.
- Documenting the Limits of a Public Schedule Search
Explain a schedule search’s coverage, time assumptions, and known omissions so readers can judge whether a result answers their actual departure-planning question.
- Separating Water Observations from Derived Summaries
Preserve each measured value with its observation context, then compute chart summaries separately so corrections and transformations remain traceable.
- A Practical Cache Policy for Changing Water Readings
Choose cache lifetime from observed update cadence and request cost, refresh safely, and show retrieval age so readers can interpret changing readings.
- Testing Unit Conversion at the Edges of a Sensor Range
A small conversion test suite should cover exact values, negative inputs, rounding boundaries, missing data, and explicit source and display units.
- How to Make a Sensor Data Import Explain Its Failures
Separate retrieval, decoding, validation, and storage failures into distinct outcomes so unattended jobs can report the stage and return an actionable status.
- Choosing a Refresh Interval for Public Environmental Data
Set refresh frequency from observed publication cadence, request cost, and the consequence of stale values, then explain the chosen freshness clearly.
- Writing a Reproducible Data Snapshot for Sensor Debugging
A useful debugging snapshot preserves retrieval time, source context, units, and the exact input values needed to reproduce a parsing or display issue safely.