I often get surprised reactions when I say that we don’t do Scrum. After reading about how other technology companies run their projects, it seems that Scrum—which is wasteful and does not fit reality—is on the way out.
A quick overview of the importance of communication in software engineering, some guidelines and the many work situations where you will be able to apply this particular skill.
I keep referring back to this distinction which though coarse remains extremely useful. The barrel-like qualities of Understand, Ideate, Take Initiative, Recruit Others, Deliver Results can definitely be nurtured in people.
Of course it still makes sense to defend yourself, but if you have any idea how software functions, it should be obvious that the number of known and unknown vulnerabilities in our devices number in the thousands and a lot of them are and remain exploited by all kinds of organizations.
I’ve had a number of amazing and unforgettable experiences with Couchsurfing mostly staying in Berlin way back in the day. This history of the site’s rise and fall fills in what happened after I lost track.
If you are looking around during the great resignation, I can tell you that things like 4-day work weeks, mission driven companies and excellent colleagues are out there to be found. For instance where I’m working now.
We’re picking up some of these large scale iOS development practices ourselves. Getting rid of those pesky conflicts in pbxproj files alone would be more than worth it.
I’m not a huge fan of the financial metaphor for tech debt but this pries apart the core of the problem well from an optionality lens (or as you could also say “rich moves”).
Hanging out on Clubhouse from the beginning made me realize how lacking my Turkish was. I got on the app when Germany came online and I think Turkey launched shortly after that and only then did it kick off in the Netherlands.
Traditional operations teams and their counterparts in product development thus often end up in conflict, most visibly over how quickly software can be released to production. At their core, the development teams want to launch new features and see them adopted by users. At their core, the ops teams want to make sure the service doesn’t break while they are holding the pager. Because most outages are caused by some kind of change—a new configuration, a new feature launch, or a new type of user traffic—the two teams’ goals are fundamentally in tension.
One, they must build psychological safety to spur learning and avoid preventable failures; two, they must set high standards and inspire and enable people to reach them.
Stripe runs on written long-form documents in a way that I haven’t seen before. So that means somebody can go deep, like all the way down, and then distill it back out to everybody else. So you don’t have to do all of that work yourself. It does require a lot of reading for sure, but the benefit is great clarity of thought on complex topics.
A good counter-point by Camille Fournier about how being a hands-off manager can turn into being an absent manager. Making sure these kind of meetings are held is the most important leverage you have as senior leadership.
‘Whomsoever is possessed of magisterial strength is courted; while whomsoever has inferior strength pays court to others. It is for this reason that the shrewd ruler strives for might.’
Enter prebuilds: pools of codespaces, fully cloned and bootstrapped, waiting to be connected with a developer who wants to get to work. The engineering investment we’ve made in prebuilds has returned its value many times over: we can now create reliable, preconfigured codespaces, primed and ready for GitHub.com development in 10 seconds.
I need to keep track of how our bet on AWS AppSync is doing which is so small that it doesn’t show up in Stack Overflow’s official tags chart but here’s an off-label website that will give it to us.
It’s a bit counterintuitive but I think it’s a good point that all the efforts to more and better coordination are harmful. We should have less coordination which will inevitably lead to more work between teams, but that is work you should be doing anyway. I think teams are in general very heavily underfacilitated.
An extremely damning account of the way Vice and also the NYT have treated Naomi Wu with some choice bad behaviour from people like Doctorow in part 2 as well.
I’m glad reality is catching up with the design fiction proposals we came up back in the day, like here the combination of video conferencing and Snapchat face filters.
“Helicopter Story” was one of the best pieces of sci-fi I’ve read in a while. All the more galling that it was ripped apart in a culture war free-for-all.
Foursquare is responsible for an inordinate amount of good times I’ve had, it still powers @cuppings and I’m still pleased that we got it to launch in Amsterdam as its first international city.
The character relations turned into a bit of a tangle so I fired up Miro and quickly charted them out. In the end it wasn’t that complicated but the worlds of Meryem and Peri are very clearly separate.
I feel this list by Dan Na of what it means to switch to the management track and this point in particular is more or less what my days consist of (intensity, attention, feeling): “Management forces you to care more about everything.”
I think this is a leveling definition that I can live with: “Managers are paid to drive results with some support. Directors are paid to drive results with little or no supervision (‘set and forget’). VPs are paid to make the plan.”
I’ve been thinking along these lines and a DNA type meeting as an informal place of leadership and sparring sound great. In our case, I think I’ll call it “Debt and Architecture”.
A good list of skills that you will need when you want to level up, but if you have to choose one, pick “Clear Written Communication” and knock that one out of the park.
Slack has an interesting S-Curve based approach to adopting new technologies where they mention that getting through the trough of adoption is more like product-work than anything else.
I started a new job and thought I’d try out OmniFocus for a change after using Things very intensively at the last job. Things felt a bit constricting and I thought I’d try out the alternative app for a change.
I’m not sure whether this will make any sales at all but Turkish Clubhouse made me brush up on my language and I loaded some old vocabulary I had lying around into an Anki deck and workflow. I thought I’d might as well productize it since high quality Anki decks for advanced learners are hard to find.
Agile is setup as a bit of a straw man in this piece about scaling product delivery, but it is true that following the existing methods too rigidly will not get you where you want to be. I’d rephrase it to say that mature teams need to be able to reflect and create their own systems as they go.
Figuring out how to onboard yourself in a remote world is something that’s directly pertinent to me since I’m starting a new job right now. The content is very much the same but it’s still quite a different experience.
This point by Charity Majors is well worth repeating: you should not take on additional responsibilities if you’re not delivering at and excelling in your core job. All of the other stuff seems like it matters a lot, but it really doesn’t.
A write-up how Dropbox rearchitected and broke up their monolith into pragmatic components. Nice to read that their base was a large Python code base, a bit similar to Instagram which is still running a branch of Django underneath.
I see lots of people still struggle with the German adjectives and especially the fact that there are three tables, one for each of definite articles, indefinite articles and when there’s no article, for 48 separate inflections.
Marijn Bolhuis sums up the devastating effects that a decade of Rutte government has in the Netherlands but people keep electing him. It follows from this that Dutch people are a bunch of piggies.