An Engineering Organization Is A System that Produces a System
People often speak of groups of humans working together as something that is inscrutable.
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4 Meta Principles For Software Engineering
Let’s discover the commonalities among them all.
Writing Tests Improves Your Code
There’s another more subtle way that it comes about that I’d like to explore in this article. How the act of writing new tests highlights when a refac...
Why Writing Is An Engineering Superpower
The strongest engineers write things down in a place where others can find them.1 This is important enough that Gitlab has it one of their core values...
Flavors Of No
We’ve largely been conditioned to do more at work, because there’s a belief that will bring a promotion or more compensation. At some point, though, y...
100% Test Coverage Is Not Enough
In order for me to get to the latter statement, I need to prove the former, but let me talk about how I justify this statement. It's about trade-offs...
Text Is The Universal Api
Text went in, and binary went out. You couldn’t explain it.1 It’s just how it worked.
Crossing The Knowing To Doing Gap
If you haven’t, you are an exceptional human being.
Graphql Why Would You Want It
GraphQL is kind of like a pick up truck. If you research one a little and ask yourself, "why would I bother to fit this gas-guzzler in my garage?" Th...
Why You Should Upgrade Laptops Regularly
Now normally some productivity guru will talk about, “I was working on the wrong things,” or “I was working to the wrong goal.” Those are definitely p...
Look ma! No thought!
However, this is not that message. I am not dismissive of the value of generative AI.
One Tool
Each sub-tool is fundamentally a sub-optimal experience. A knife that is just a knife would be better than any knife on a Swiss Army Knife. A screwdri...
The Second System Effect
Moreover, the scope of the second system expands. Hubris runs rampant for all those involved in the project until timelines slip and then slip again.
Sustainable Scaling
This is the way. Right?
To Kubernetes Or Not To Kubernetes
I know Kubernetes sounds really cool. But after using it for about 5 years, I can give some broad advice here and save you some pain: 99% of the compa...
Quit Your Projects Earlier
Instead I’m going to try to convince you that, you probably shouldn’t finish every personal project you start or even most of them. Instead I’ll advoc...
How To Sanely Test Complex Systems
"We don't have tests for that, because it's too complicated."
A Love Letter To Git
Git is one of those things.
Principles Of Product Requirements
This list is for that occasion: listening to your users and getting their requirements.
Data Untangling
After getting it restored, I began probing through the different tables figuring that one of them surely would have a datetime column for to begin to ...
Ghost Ship Project
So testing it was critical.
Engineering Is Trade Offs
This is a comment I wrote about 5 years ago on one of the biggest hacks I put into production ever.
Revisit Decisions
This all ran on a single MySQL database. No replication. But lots of caching to Redis.
Start Somewhere
A couple of days later I was starting have my confidence shaken, because I couldn't find the "right way" to do this. At one point I thought to myself,...
Are You Satisfied With Your Job
How satisfied are you with your compensation?
Agile Is Not Scrum
Most companies really don’t do Agile. They do something else.
Counting The Costs Of Dependencies
Dependencies are me outsourcing my code to someone else. Something for nothing. Free sounds awesome at first. Borrowing someone else’s work is only pa...
Checklist Before Merge To Master
Notice what’s not on the list?
How To Use Checklists
A practical guide on effectively using checklists to improve processes and reduce errors.
Interviewing Developers
Clearly, there’s something to this idea. So let me show you how we try to do it where I work.
Keeping Up With The Valley
I suspect it’s a consequence of the quarterly heartbeat from Wall Street. But for us in tech, there’s almost never any let up.
Modern Software Development Analyzed
I’m going to attempt to rank these in their order of appearance by the two authors, even though the ranking was likely random.
Modern Software Development Are We There Yet
Here’s the Joel Test again.
Project Management Systems Suck
But there’s a long tail out there: Ganttic, Team Week, Hub Planner, Flow, Teamgrid, netsuite, ResourceGuru, Harvest Forecast, Zoho projects, Wrike, Li...
The Soothsaying Developer
“I’m not sure how long it’ll take,” I said.