Ever stared at a 500 Internal Server Error and thought, “This tells me everything I need to know”? Of course not. Unfriendly errors are the worst. The API consumer gets stuck wondering what went wrong, and you (the developer) end up sifting through logs trying to figure it out.
In software, simplicity is the key to good design. Users don’t need to struggle with complexity; they want tools that help them work, not get in the way. But tools like dbt Cloud, which should make data transformation easier, do the opposite. Instead of a simple process, they wrap users in layers of Git integration, adding confusion where there should be none.
Whether it’s way back when I used to fumble through htop at work to figure out what’s happening with some on-prem server, or if it’s today when
lazydocker and k9s have grown into critical tools that maximize my productivity,
I’ve always been a huge fan of terminal UIs–especially those that are highly interactive.
In this post I’d like to cover a cool python decorator that’s part of the built-in functools library called @singledispatch. It’s a
favorite of mine and something I’ve been using quite a bit over the past year. I’m surprised how little I see it in projects I come across
so hopefully this post will help it find its way into a repo or two. ;)