A long winding post by @codefolio that’s probably better career advice for this programming thing than any.
https://codefol.io/posts/the-forty-year-programmer/
Month: October 2022
Adam Tooze asks:
Does it really make sense to perpetuate a system in which disastrous financial risks are built into the profit-driven provision of basic financial products like pensions and mortgages? Yes the central bank can act as the fire brigade, but why do we such a dangerous situation as normality. Why do the smoke detectors fail again and again? And why is the house not more fire proof? It is time to ask who benefits and who pays the cost for continuing with this dangerously inflammable system.
https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-157-the-bond-market-massacre
Does it make sense? Probably not.
Lots of great ways to manage change in organizations. It’s a bunch of work to do this, but if you skip these steps, the results can and will backfire. I particularly like the guiding policy strategy where even if I don’t know something I can usually spitball the values and invariants of the situation that will fit the result.
The autofocus way of handling todos has a charm in that it treats your work as an endless stream and tries to take the negativity and failure out of it. I now am doing something quite similar by using Things as the river and dragging tasks into my calendar which has a natural limit to it.
Reading about China’s message board theorists is amazing and makes me wish I could have stuck with Chinese. But then again I would have not learned it well enough probably ever to be able to follow what’s happening on the Chinese internet, so this will have to do.
https://www.palladiummag.com/2021/04/09/chinas-exit-to-year-zero/
Reading this I learned an absurd amount about China that I didn’t know yet.
The corollary to this is that in any field where there is a gender disparity, the surplus of people is subcompetent.
Let’s take software engineering as an example.
If we assume that programming ability is distributed equally between men and women–and there’s really nothing pointing in a different direction here– then it follows that if there are 80% men and 20% men in the field, then those 30% men are taking up the spots of women who would have been better at this work.
Ceteris paribus of course, which it isn’t for all kinds of similarly gender equity related reasons.
And to go one further, the incompetent men in the field know they’re incompetent. That’s why they try to keep women out and are often nasty to work with.
Love this write-up of somebody jamming on passing all the tests in sqllogictest from scratch, in a week. Programming as pure tour de force.
These days, “no one is taking any creative risk,”said Laura Mayer, a veteran podcast executive and producer who’s worked at several large publishers. “We’re seeing plenty of efforts to reverse-engineer what were successes in podcasting, and as a result, we get a lot of watered-down karaoke attempts at what worked out in the past.”
The more budget and production values a podcast has, generally the less it’s worth listening to.
Seeing that Gitlab had published their TeamOps framework, I stayed up late to get my certification. I especially liked the recorded meetings with Sid Sijbrand and other Gitlab senior staff that they have published on YouTube.
Running multiple strategic tracks will set you up to dominate at a large scale, but many organizations can’t run one let alone run multiple at the same time. The visualization and plays as described here by Itamar Gilad look a lot like Wardley mapping.
Measuring software development productivity is really complicated. That’s in large part what makes it so interesting.
https://www.swarmia.com/blog/measuring-software-development-productivity/
Product sense (and taste) are so important but so hard to pinpoint and teach to others. Lenny here unpacks what goes into it but even then there are very few shortcuts to getting it.
People want local development but I feel a lot of the reasons and movements described here are valid.
https://dx.tips/the-end-of-localhost
When I try to unpack it, it’s usually not even very clear what ‘local development’ means but I think it’s something along the lines of: 1. Being able to manipulate the system under development immediately using the command-line. 2. Not being able to break an unrelated system and not having somebody else break your development environment. I get that those two things are essential but there’s nothing in them that requires them to take place on your physical laptop.
A short guide of how a team can turn around the work they need to do on a legacy system and come out the better for it. I’ve seen lots of teams struggle with this but as described here a lot of it is in the approach and the praxis of doing it and working together.
https://leaddev.com/legacy-technical-debt-migrations/how-make-your-team-fall-love-legacy-code
Nice to read a project we worked on a long time ago (web application concept and initial set of user stories to hand off to development) is still going strong. This project and others like it support my thinking that it’s possible to solve problems definitely in a product agency context.
A relevant and nuanced complication of agile by Dorian Taylor seeing it as a trauma based response where the core practice has gotten stuck and is preventing the industry from solving more fundamental issues.
Pretty much each of these 20 systems thinking tips, I’ve had to learn the hard way so seeing them all in one place is good but also difficult.
People see this kind of talk about self-governance and think there is no process or management in such a setup while usually there is more (and higher quality) than in a traditional organization. It’s also some of the best work you will ever do.