“I am successful if I’m saying the right “No”s to my manager. If the ICs that report to my manager end up feeling like “I told you so”or “We knew this was a bad idea”and that wasn’t surfaced for a discussion, that’s on me.”
Most of my discussions with data scientists have revolved around exactly this point (usually to serious pushback): that they need to be end-to-end to deliver value in an organization.
I love the examples in this bit about great engineering cultures: teamwork as default, quality is personal, results driven meetings & retrospectives are fun
The opinions of ‘Uncle Bob’ have always been harmful both when it comes to code as well as non-code. It’s a bit shameful for us as an industry that it took so long for people to wisen up to this.
Remember that in any organisation, people make decisions — decisions are about trade-offs, and decisions can be influenced, overturned, and changed. More importantly, organisations evolve— the way decisions were made yesterday might not be the way they get made tomorrow!
Not just one thing that every dev should know but a bag full of hard won non-technical multipliers that will improve all of your interactions in this podcast episode with Jesica Kerr.
I’ve always felt that programming is more similar to languages than to mathematics. The number of hard maths problems that we solve as part of this work are really limited, the number of language problems on the other hand is immense.
An overview of the philosophical and technical revolutions that are necessary to be able to develop in production. It’s a long way but I believe even the journey to get there is worth it.
One of the points in this list by Paul Osman that I recently stumbled on is that things like “staging”are indeed mostly useless however much people want to keep using them.
A long treatment of how to scale work as organizations grow with some helpful guidelines: “Keep the work parallel, the groups small, and the resources local.”
I’m glad that this takedown of Clean Code by Dan Abramov got so much traction. I have no problem with clean code (lowercase), but inevitably the process of getting there and the things people do as a consequence make the entire endeavor an anti-pattern.
Then we get at Chapter 05: Composing and I really don’t understand the need to faff around so much when it comes to such a mathematically simple subject.
Such a well-written and cogent argument by Dave Mangot about how it definitely does matter whether you choose to deploy on Fridays or not and also that that choice is fully your own.
Figma’s multiplayer support is fantastic and something similar should be a part of every creative application. Now they’ve also written a very understandable high-level overview of their implementation (with CRDTs).
Berlin is finally thinking of fixing its totally and utterly broken website. That’s good news but a shame that we have had to use this monstrosity for the past ten years.
I’d say a lot of this criticism of React is fair but because all frameworks have jumped onto components, I don’t really see a realistic workable alternative either.
After this piece, I’m totally sold on the benefits of mentoring (and registered myself on Coding Coach). I would be open to mentor a couple of people on engineering/product management/leadership.
One of the most well-known examples of code reuse between Android and iOS, Dropbox, is giving up on it because it’s too difficult to find people who can/want to write C++ code.
An impressive application of the strangle vine pattern to rewrite the Slack desktop client which everybody loved to hate. The write-up reads rather matter-of-fact but the process to get there most likely was not.
Reading Shopify’s approach to keeping their merchant’s secure at their humongous scale seems to come down to the radical standardization of everything. People think this is boring (it isn’t) but it has tons of benefits beyond just security.
One good example with an open sourced tool over at Slack of how they’ve implemented their Security Development Lifecycle to enable their developers to move forward confidently.
The manifesto to choose boring technology in order to be able to solve interesting problems is something to (re-)read regularly until you’ve internalized it.
Cloudflare is setting a high bar for post-mortem writing but if you want to get started with this, the only parts you really need are: What went wrong & What are we doing about it.
Any programming language once it gets big enough will face pressure to turn into Java. PHP succumbed to it, let’s see where Go goes. Try isn’t that big of an issue but it is a path that eventually may lead to… generics and other stuff.
Lovely to see the Twisted community take the lead in moving Python forward and I fully support this idea of giving the standard library the Konmari treatment.
Amazon RedShift is a hosted version of ParAccel. More recently, a plethora of open source SQL-on-Hadoop projects have emerged; they are young but aiming to compete with commercial data warehouse systems. These include Apache Hive, Spark SQL, Cloudera Impala, Facebook Presto, Apache Tajo, and Apache Drill [52, 53].
A frankly amazing piece by Monica Lent using her experience to debunk seven commonly held truths about programming with verve. Programming consists of folklore and beliefs are often just beliefs. That indeed makes most learning in this field a question of unlearning.
A nicely put explanation for why I too pick my environments to be maximally productive with minimal configuration. In many cases, I just make do to the disgust of those who’ve learned all the shortcuts and applied all the customizations, but to them I’d say: marginal returns and opportunity cost.
I’d dare say that with the waning of the iPhone as a platform (both for development and for business), Apple’s closed plays will be increasingly lackluster. I’ve been rooting for Swift but it’s a horse running in the wrong race.
Gitlab’s CEO Shadow Program is a testament to their deep and deliberate thinking about organizational development. I’m curious whether more companies do this.
The issue around the Python standard library finally comes to a head thanks to a Twisted contributor. The standard library has felt stale for a very long time now. It’s nice that it’s there but nobody can really program anything in Python without external packages. There really is no debate here and core Python should support actual programmers.