Friday, December 27, 2019

RIF Notes #58–Year end blow out

"Doing nothing is better than being busy doing nothing." — Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching


Bonus quotes

"If you can't modularize a monolith, what makes you think that you can create microservices?"

"Has it occurred to you that teaching folks how to collaborate in an environment that encourages the opposite (eg use of performance reviews that promote individual behaviour) is a fools errand?…Here's another head-scratcher: companies that "value collaboration" but stack rank everyone every year" - Dan Creswell

"Listing bugs in some ticketing system does not fix them. Fix them. If there are too many to do that, it may be time for a rewrite, and this time enforce a no-known-bugs-on-deployment rule. Bugs slow down development. They are productivity killers." - Allen Holub

"I define a monolith as a single executable with all code running in a single address space." - Uncle Bob

"People who ask for data rarely have data to support the alternative they prefer." – Allen Holub

"No single message bus product will provide all these features. To mitigate the risk of choosing poorly, you should start with a plain, easy-to-use and free message bus, and implement the architecture initially with that message bus. This will enable you to learn about what are the desired qualities, attributes, and to prioritize them. Only then chose the best of breed" – Juval

"It is more important for code to be changeable than that it work. Code that does not work, but that is easy to change, can be made to work with minimum effort. Code that works but that is hard to change will soon not work and be hard to get working again." - Uncle Bob

"When you first study a field, it seems like you have to memorize a zillion things. You don't. What you need is to identify the 3-5 core principles that govern the field. The million things you thought you had to memorize are various combinations of the core principles." -J. Reed

"Please do not fall prey to the idea that any activity that does not measurably advance your career is somehow necessarily harming it. You have only this one beautiful life; do not avoid living it for fear that your total productive output might be less than the theoretical max." Katie Mack


Wednesday, December 4, 2019

Friday, October 4, 2019

RIF Notes #56

The best advice I've ever received is, 'No one else knows what they're doing either'.’” - Ricky Gervais

“To figure out whether you really understand an idea, write it down. Unclear writing is a sign of unclear thinking. To figure out whether anyone else will understand your writing, read it out loud. Unclear speaking is a sign of unclear writing.” –Adam Grant

“Corporate life (not mine) is fascinating. Book an hour long meeting with 40 people with no agenda? No one bats an eye. Ask for a few hundred bucks for professional development? Requires several weeks of discussion and goes all the way up to VP level for review.” Eric Bin

“A "vanity metric" is something that you measure that doesn't lead to improvement. They aren't "actionable." E.g.: the number of page hits on your web site is a vanity metric because there's nothing you can do if you don't like the number, & it tells you nothing useful.” – Allen Holub

“My code can’t be tidier than my thinking. The purpose of my tidying is to clarify my thinking by manipulating the code. The code ends up better, but because I understand more not because I somehow forced it to be better in spite of my confusion.” – Kent Beck

Monday, August 19, 2019

RIF Notes #55

“I don't believe in selling "Agile" at all, and I *really* don't believe in selling somebody metrics or indicators. If somebody want's proof that what you're doing is effective, ask them what a good indicator would be." -Allen Holub

Friday, May 31, 2019

RIF Notes #54

"You know, I’ve been in the software development business for more than 40 years now, and there is one thing that I know for a solid fact: Nobody knows how to build software. Yes, sometimes it gets built, but it’s a random, unrepeatable event. A lucky accident." - Alan Cooper

Thursday, May 23, 2019

RIF Notes #53

"’When will you be done’ When it comes to Agile dev, the best metaphor is life. You're not done until you're dead. Up till then, it's an ongoing and dynamic process where you learn things and adapt based on what you learn. Project thinking is not useful; think product." - Allen Holub

Thursday, May 16, 2019

RIF Notes #52

“Most corporate planning is like a ritual rain dance. It has no effect on the weather, but those who engage in it think it does. Much of the advice and instruction is directed at improving the dancing, not the weather” - Russel L. Ackoff


  • GDPR in the USA – “GDPR enforcement began in May of 2018, but if you are doing business in the US, you may not think it applies to you. Grant Fritchey explains why you might be wrong about that and why you need to act now”
  • Domain-Oriented Observability – “Observability in our software systems has always been valuable and has become even more so in this era of cloud and microservices. However, the observability we add to our systems tends to be rather low level and technical in nature, and too often it seems to require littering our codebase with crufty, verbose calls to various logging, instrumentation, and analytics frameworks. This article describes a pattern that cleans up this mess and allows us to add business-relevant observability in a clean, testable way”
  • Workers Love AirPods Because Employers Stole Their Walls –“Research indicates that removing partitions is actually much worse for collaborative work and productivity than closed offices ever were”
  • Two hour controlled meeting study – “This is crazy. Study shows three people in a conference room over 2 hours can result in a Co2 level that can impair cognitive functioning. Ie. If you’re making decisions at the end of the meeting, you’re mentally less qualified to do so”
  • Stress, Health, and Productivity – “Some employers assume that stressful working conditions are a necessary evil-that companies must turn up the pressure on workers and set aside health concerns to remain productive and profitable in today’s economy. But research findings challenge this belief. Studies show that stressful working conditions are actually associated with increased absenteeism, tardiness, and intentions by workers to quit their jobs-all of which have a negative effect on the bottom line”
  • Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture – Akin to the desire from more Incident reports.
  • It Will Never Work in Theory – “Happy software developers solve problems better: psychological measurements in empirical software engineering”
  • Remaining Relevant as a .NET Developer
  • Don’t solve the problem. - ”What makes a great manager isn’t the problems they solve, but the questions they ask. Start with these 16 questions here.”

Friday, January 18, 2019

RIF Notes #50!

"The two hardest problems in computer science are: (i) people, (ii), convincing computer scientists that the hardest problem in computer science is people, and, (iii) off by one errors." -Jeff Bigham