🔗 The Tyranny of the Marginal User

The Tyranny of the Marginal User - by Ivan Vendrov How is it possible that software gets worse, not better, over time, despite billions of dollars of R&D and rapid progress in tooling and AI? What evil force, more powerful than Innovation and Progress, is at work here? … I call this force the Tyranny of the Marginal User. … a company with a billion-user product doesn’t actually care about its billion existing users....

September 15, 2023 · 1 min · 155 words

🔗 The exponential horn of testing

The exponential horn of testing · GitHub The actual model that more closely resembles what we need should have the bare minimum of E2E tests, quite a number of service tests and the vast majority should be unit tests. Exponential model: x = 10^hy So if the height h goes from 1 to 2 to 3 then we have 1 E2E test to 100 service tests to 10,000 unit tests....

September 14, 2023 · 1 min · 85 words

📜 Software companies

Your company may not be in the software business, but eventually, a software company will be in your business. — Naval on Twitter

September 10, 2023 · 1 min · 23 words

🔗 PNGme: An Intermediate Rust Project

Introduction - PNGme: An Intermediate Rust Project This guide is intended to fill the gap between heavily directed beginner tutorials and working on your own projects. The primary goal here is to get you writing code. The secondary goal is to get you reading documentation. If you haven’t read The Rust Programming Language yet, I highly encourage you to do so before attempting this project. This guide does not cover any language features....

September 7, 2023 · 1 min · 73 words

🏞 SQL Iceberg Meme Explanation

“SQL Iceberg Meme” (Avestura’s Blog) Explaining The Postgres Meme One of the best ways to learn something is to explain it, and this blog post aims to do exactly that. Let’s review and explain every part of this meme, while unraveling its meaning and secrets.

September 6, 2023 · 1 min · 45 words

🔗 Cheat Sheets Finder

Cheat Sheet Finder | finders This page provides links to and short descriptions of content that provides succinct guidance on many different topics, which fall under domains such as Agile software development, and working in teams. The Cheat Sheet Finder includes the following categories: Flow/Getting Stuff Done Psychological Safety Kanban, eXtreme Programming (XP), Scrum Software Development

August 24, 2023 · 1 min · 56 words

🔗 Weak Passwords

http://weakpasswords.net 100~ common passwords based on last 90 days, updated daily

August 15, 2023 · 1 min · 11 words

📜 Gregor’s Law

Excessive complexity is nature’s punishment for organizations that are unable to make decisions. — Gregor Hohpe in The Architect Elevator You can trace its origin to my original blog post on IT complexity from 2018.

August 14, 2023 · 1 min · 35 words

📺 How to measure and improve developer productivity | Nicole Forsgren

Dr. Nicole Forsgren is a developer productivity and DevOps expert who works with engineering organizations to make work better. Best known as co-author of the Shingo Publication Award-winning book Accelerate and the DevOps Handbook, 2nd edition and author of the State of DevOps Reports, she has helped some of the biggest companies in the world transform their culture, processes, tech, and architecture. In today’s podcast, we discuss: Two frameworks for measuring developer productivity: DORA and SPACE Benchmarks for what good and great look like Common mistakes to avoid when measuring developer productivity Resources and tools for improving your metrics Signs your developer experience needs attention How to improve your developer experience Nicole’s Four-Box framework for thinking about data and relationships Chapters...

July 31, 2023 · 5 min · 1030 words

💭 PHP shenanigans

Pop quiz about PHP and something we’ve stumbled upon last week, while working on a client’s codebase. ...

April 15, 2019 · 2 min · 294 words
Father pointing to a slate board with a lock drawn in chalk and his 2 twin sons looking at it, in black and white crayons

💭 Educating security

A real story of how following good security practices is both easier to do than ad-hoc methods, and it spreads quickly to others.

March 18, 2019 · 3 min · 461 words

📜 Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for

Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute. Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman in MIT Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs course (via Brevity vs. Clarity · An A List Apart Blog Post )

March 8, 2015 · 1 min · 42 words

📺 #noestimates

The problem? For example, 3 guys wrote a paper in 86 and they said that a good estimate is an estimate that’s within 25% of the original estimate, 75% of the time … so, mostly one quarter wrong . Yikes, not a very good prospect at all. The gist of #noestimates to determine how much scope can be delivered by a given date: Select the most important piece of work you need to do (highest value first) Break that piece of work down into risk-neutral chunks of work: (…) small enough that failing to deliver it at first attempt will not jeopardize the project [typically ~1 day chunks] Develop (…) Deliver that work to a production-like environment....

January 3, 2015 · 2 min · 238 words

🔗 Learn X in Y Minutes: Scenic Programming Language Tours

Learn X in Y Minutes: Scenic Programming Language Tours Learn X in Y minutes : Take a whirlwind tour of your next favorite language. Community-driven!

October 24, 2014 · 1 min · 25 words

🏞 (image)

The Flipboard Explorer, or FLEX, is a component that you can easily drop into any iOS project. When presented, FLEX shows a debugging toolbar that lives in a window above your app. From this toolbar, you can view and modify nearly every piece of state in the application. Unlike many other debugging tools, FLEX works entirely inside your app, so you donʼt need to be connected to LLDB/Xcode or a different remote debugging server....

September 30, 2014 · 1 min · 91 words

🔗 The Wilderness

The Wilderness It’s a period of time where I’m pretty lost, and I don’t know what to do. I have feature lists, I have open bugs to fix, and I have an outline of where the app is going. But I feel mentally incapacitated, like I’m getting nothing done. I call this “The Wilderness”.

September 30, 2014 · 1 min · 54 words

🏞 (image)

Not all technical debt is born the same, because A Mess is not a Technical Debt . (via TechnicalDebtQuadrant )

August 16, 2014 · 1 min · 20 words
Examples of a sketch, wireframe and mockup, side by side

💭 UI/UX design artefacts

Compare and contrast different design artefacts (sketch, wireframe, mockup, and prototype) in terms of their fidelity, speed, cost and use cases.

March 27, 2014 · 1 min · 134 words

🏞 (image)

(via What’s wrong with this picture? | Code.org ) Computer science is a top paying college degree and computer programming jobs are growing at 2x the national average . Less than 2.4% of college students graduate with a degree in computer science. And the numbers have dropped since last decade. See also Promote Computer Science | Code.org

March 27, 2014 · 1 min · 57 words

🔗 Richard Feynman, the Challenger Disaster, and Software Engineering : Gustavo Duarte

Richard Feynman, the Challenger Disaster, and Software Engineering : Gustavo Duarte With respect to software, I take out four main points: Engineering can only be as good as its relationship with management Big design up front is foolish Software has much in common with other engineering disciplines Reliable systems are built by rigorously tested , incremental bottom-up engineering with an ‘attitude of highest quality’

January 28, 2014 · 1 min · 64 words