The deadline doom loop - by James Hawkins Here’s how the loop plays out: Phase 1: “We’re gonna make it!” 👍 Phase 2: “Are we gonna make it?” 🤷 Phase 3: “We’re not gonna make it!” 🥵 Phase 4: “We (sort of) made it.” 😵💫 Phase 5: “We’re gonna make it this time!” 🙏 Principles for escaping the doom loop The alternative, an approach that helps us ship faster, relies on a few key principles: ...
How to ship fast - by Ben McRedmond - Wrap Text by Equals Protect momentum Beware of prioritization Stay close to the design You should be wrong sometimes Only doers can plan what you work on Always plan the How There is no quality vs. speed tradeoff Capture inspiration
“Little Billy Ignore Instructions” by Philippe Schrettenbrunner (LinkedIn) Remember Little Bobby Tables? I think he has a sibling. Just some iPad doodles. Stay safe, sanitize all inputs. (Original xkcd comic: Exploits of a Mom) [aka “Little Bobby Tables”] School: Hi, this is your son’s school. We’re having some computer trouble. Parent: Oh dear - did he break something? ...
If you process less than 10k requests per second, you’re not Google nor are you Facebook. — Henryk Plötz in Should I Use JWTs For Authentication Tokens? - Tinker, Tamper, Alter, Fry
GitHub - dandavison/delta: A syntax-highlighting pager for git, diff, grep, and blame output Code evolves, and we all spend time studying diffs. Delta aims to make this both efficient and enjoyable: it allows you to make extensive changes to the layout and styling of diffs, as well as allowing you to stay arbitrarily close to the default git/diff output.
The Composable Architecture: My 3 Year Experience • Rod Schmidt I recently finished a 3 year stint with a company that uses the Composable Architecture (TCA) from PointFree. I wanted to write about my experiences with TCA and some of the problems I see with it. It’s Complicated The [High] Churn Architectural Issues Performance Issues Company Organizational Issues Company Risks You might be more productive onboarding new developers and adding features with another architecture and still be able to achieve your desired architectural discipline with MVVM or Clean Architecture. ...
Catalog of Refactoring Refactoring.Guru makes it easy for you to discover everything you need to know about refactoring, design patterns, SOLID principles, and other smart programming topics. See also: The Catalog of Refactoring The Catalog of Design Patterns
Enshittification - Wikipedia Enshittification is the pattern of decreasing quality observed in online services and products … The term was used by writer Cory Doctorow in November 20221 … Doctorow has also used the term platform decay to describe the same concept. The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok | WIRED Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. ...
“A diagram of the relationships between Unix systems” by Eraserhead1, Infinity0, Sav_vas (Wikipedia)
Building Bluesky: a Distributed Social Network (Real-World Engineering Challenges) Rapid growth. The product went from zero to 5 million users in around 12 months after announcing an invite-only beta. Small team. Bluesky was built with a small team of 3 engineers during the first year, and with 12 software engineers at the time of publication.
It’s time to be outcome driven - Felipe Castro - OKR Trainer, Speaker, Author As Benedict Evans points out, humans have a clear tendency when they get new tools: There’s an old saying that when we get a new tool, we begin by making it fit the old way of working, and then we change the way we work to fit the new tool. ...
Simple suggestions for technology investment. | by swardley | Apr, 2024 | Medium Wardley’s unproven method of thinking about investment. Step 1: Ignore the consultants, business gurus and analyst reports. Step 2: Gather some actual practitioners. Step 3: Ask them what matters. Step 4: Categorise the list. Step 5: Map the perspectives [Parallel] Step 6: Identify areas of investment. [Parallel] Step 7: Aggregation and comparison. TL;DR Be clear on your purpose. Understand the landscape. Realise that the landscape changes. Analysts are a good signal for the market but that may not be where you should invest. Diversity matters.
Hypermedia Systems We hope to have convinced you that hypermedia, rather than being a “legacy” technology or a technology only appropriate for “documents” of links, text and pictures, is, in fact, a powerful technology for building applications. In this book you have seen how to build sophisticated user interfaces — for both the web, with htmx, and for mobile applications, using Hyperview — using hypermedia as a core underlying application technology. ...
The State of Engineering Productivity in 2024 📊 1) Hybrid is hard Teams who work in hybrid mode have the hardest time. It is tough to create an environment where the playing field is level for everybody: there is less incentive to build a truly remote-friendly environment than in full-remote teams, while at the same time you don’t get the full benefits of co-location. Committing decisively to one of the two extremes might bring better results in terms of productivity — but of course it can be more challenging in other departments. ...
Do you work at a tech company? | Irrational Exuberance [for engineers] a technology company is one with a strong engineering culture and empowered engineering leadership. Not the business model, not the legal definition, not “pure” innovation, but having a place at the table and being a table you want to sit at. how do you determine if a company empowers and supports their engineering organization? … CEO’s background … … ratio of engineering to total headcount … … engineering representation in the senior leadership team … … titles and seniority across organizations … … extent and quality of their engineering brand efforts … navigate your network … [and ask] … ask questions … of the their engineering culture to … different interviewers …
Difftastic, a structural diff Difftastic is a CLI diff tool that compares files based on their syntax, not line-by-line. Difftastic produces accurate diffs that are easier for humans to read.
Test-Driven Development Guided by ZOMBIES | Agile Alliance The acronym stands for: Z – Zero O – One M – Many (or More complex) B – Boundary Behaviors I – Interface definition E – Exercise Exceptional behavior S – Simple Scenarios, Simple Solutions
Backlog size is inversely proportional to how often you talk to customers As with anything, these are not absolute truths but born out of my experience. Replace planning time with talking to customers Reduce time spent on UI design; focus on technical component design instead How you think people use your app is different than how they use it Implement account spoofing Page one real estate is critical to a seamless experience Your customer is your most important marketer MVPs are pointless if you’re not going to iterate on them There is no point to having a large backlog because the bigger the backlog, the higher the unvalidated assumptions, and the lower the chance that it creates any customer value. ...
Messaging Patterns Overview - Enterprise Integration Patterns This pattern catalog describes 65 integration patterns, collected from many integration projects since 2002. The patterns provide technology-independent design guidance for developers and architects to describe and develop robust integration solutions. The inspiration to document these patterns came when we struggled through multiple integration vendors’ product documentation just to realize later that many of the underlying concepts were quite similar.
Architecture Antipatterns Discover common architecture antipatterns, learn how to avoid them and overcome design pitfalls! Gain valuable insights, practical advice, and real-world examples to build better software architectures and improve existing ones. Cargo-Culting Domain Allergy Emotional Attachment Infrastructure Ignorance Malignant Growth Misapplied Genericity Never change a running system Over-Engineering Over-Modularization Under-Modularization