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Good Code Articles

Written by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, product management, and development partner.

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    • Design
    • Web
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  1. Velocity vs. Quality - How do developers and founders meet in the middle?

    Finding the right balance between writing quality software and shipping features rapidly.

    Tom Wey
    August 19, 2019
    • Consulting
    • Technical Debt
    • Good Code
    • Productivity
  2. Better domain modeling in Elixir with sum types

    Sum types are a powerful domain modeling technique. Let’s look at how to use them to remove invalid states.

    German Velasco
    July 26, 2019
    • Elixir
    • Functional Programming
    • Types
    • Good Code
  3. Chess and Recursion: Part 1

    It turns out solving chess moves with recursion and pattern matching is a lot of fun!

    Dan Barber
    August 10, 2018
    • Code
    • Good Code
    • Elixir
    • Phoenix
    • Recursion
  4. Writing Less Error-Prone Code

    How to optimize for a living codebase, where a line of code will be repeatedly read, adapted and copied.

    Oli Peate
    June 8, 2018
    • Code
    • Good Code
  5. What's Weird with Maybe List

    When you spot Maybe List in your code, it may be time to think about alternatives.

    Joël Quenneville
    May 21, 2018
    • Elm
    • Good Code
    • Web
  6. Organize your functional code

    When coming to a functional language, I often hear people ask, “How do I organize my code?” Let’s take a look at some ways in which data can tell us how to organize our modules and functions.

    German Velasco
    March 19, 2018
    • Elixir
    • Functional Programming
    • Good Code
    • Code
  7. Problem Solving with Maybe

    Write more confident code to avoid viral Maybe taking over your project.

    Joël Quenneville
    February 12, 2018
    • Elm
    • Functional Programming
    • Good Code
    • Web
  8. Booleans and Enums

    Refactor common Boolean smells using enums (union types).

    Joël Quenneville
    September 20, 2017
    • Web
    • Elm
    • Good Code
  9. Spend Your Divergence Wisely

    Complexity makes apps harder to use and harder to maintain. We can avoid that unnecessary complexity by starting with good defaults and from there making informed decisions about where to diverge from them.

    Mason Fischer
    March 2, 2017
    • Good Code
    • Techniques
    • Web
  10. Composition vs Inheritance

    Choose the right tool for the job when building modular software.

    Joël Quenneville
    November 3, 2016
    • Web
    • Ruby
    • Good Code
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