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If your application does anything interesting, it has secrets. No, not that no one remembers how your code works, or that that one dev put a curse word in his checkin once. Not those kind of secrets. We’re talking about database passwords, secret API keys, per-user encryption keys, and the like. For a long time, web developers put those in configuration files or read them from files which programmers promised never to accidentally check in. Cross your heart.

Unit of measure conversions are a constant concern in scientific code. Most well written scientific domain kernels should be unit un-aware because the equations of nature are generally unit invariant: momentum is mass times velocity whether velocity is in meters per second or furlongs per fortnight. But there are always important places where the actual values matter: water boils at 100 degrees Celsius. Therefore one typically assumes a set of canonical units in the computational domain to make the programming more straightforward. It’s also more efficient and numerically stable to only translate units on the boundaries of the computation domain, rather than littering them throughout.

Join us as we discuss the reasons for and ways to approach the final phase of the product's lifecycle.