RIF Notes #58–Year end blow out

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

• Why product objectives are your best guide to team design
• Don't get locked up into avoiding lock-in
• You can heal the internet
• Async/Await - Best Practices in Asynchronous Programming
• Software Architecture Guide
• Hello, production-“Deploying something useless into production, as soon as you can, is the right way to start a new project. It pulls unknown risk forward, opens up parallel streams of work, and establishes good habits”
• The challenge with adding more engineers to a project. Just moving from 3 developers to 4 doubles the number of lines of communication.
• Age Discrimintation in Tech
• Ditch the elevator pitch
• Software architecture as a function of trust
• Large Organization Software Development Misconception #2: Are All Teams Working On Equal Value Stuff? – “there’s a difference between feeling productive, and actually doing the highest value work”
• Decisions, Decisions or Why Baskets of Options Dominate

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

RIF Notes #57

"If you ever hear yourself saying, 'I think I understand this,' that means you don't." - Richard Feynman

• Impact of multitasking in the company (quantified ) – “In this case, instead of cutting jobs, the client just needed to reduce multitasking.”
• Options for .NET’s versioning issues
• How to Make Good Code Reviews Better
• When Tech Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself
• Designing for a Future That’s Hard to Imagine
• Marking the end of pixel trackers in Basecamp emails
• ReSharper Ultimate 2019.2.2 is Out!
• Is Agile Headed for a Backlash
• Technology Radar Vol.21
• 4-Day Workweek Boosted Workers' Productivity By 40%, Microsoft Japan Says & icrosoft Japan’s experiment with 3-day weekend boosts worker productivity by 40 percent
• WeWork to Remove Phone Booths From Offices Due to Formaldehyde – “These booths at Amazon registered 8000 ppb of VOCs when I plugged a @getawair in one of them. And they accumulate 2000 ppm CO2 in <1hr. They're very effective at giving you a quick headache. Unfortunately they're often the only available space for a call.”

RIF Notes #56

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

• Goodbye Microservices – a cautionary tale.
• An example of preparatory refactoring – I’ve been practicing and advocating this for a long time not realizing there was a term for it."make the change easy, then make the easy change".
• Tech Lead – Circles of Responsibility
• The Death of the Enterprise Architecture Framework?
• Thread challenging microservices
• The four core behaviours of agility:
• Self-Organization - Scary but Powerful (Part II)
• Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential.- More about microservices
• Don't get locked up into avoiding lock-in
• Why Your Privacy Is Worth More Than You Think
• How my colleagues and I stay sane in our open office
• Open offices drive all sorts of bad behavior
• One of the classic rebuttals to the so-called benefits of remote working is the Allen Curve
• The Wisdom of Pessimism
• Please Do Not Take More Risks
• Inhumanity of Root Cause Analysis
• Organizations with a lack of psychological safety are incentivized for big batches (a.k.a. waterfall).

“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

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

• How Slack Harms Projects – or any real-time communications tool
• Why keeping levels of abstraction matters
• Microsoft Feature Toggle Feature Flag Library: A First Look
• Building a Great Technical Team
• Configure Visual Studio across your organization with .vsconfig
• Aggregating strings in SQL Server, using Irish Saints Days
• Classes vs. Data Structures
• Find, Fix, and Avoid Performance Problems in C# .NET: 10 Best Practices
• Fuck hard work – “This obsession with “hard work” is founded in a pessimistic view of natural state of humanity being lazy loafers. That unless we constantly reinforce the virtue of “hard work”, we’re all just going to slouch on the couch”
• Visual Studio tips and tricks

RIF Notes #54

“Good writing is clear thinking made visible” - Meir Ezra

• TechnicalDebt
• DesignStaminaHypothesis
• CannotMeasureProductivity
• How did we get to service meshes?

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

• QA in Production
• What do you mean by “Event-Driven”?
• Events, Data Points, and Messages - Choosing the right Azure messaging service for your data
• Waste (and production efficiency)
• Is High Quality Software Worth the Cost? – “High internal quality reduces the cost of future features, meaning that putting the time into writing good code actually reduces cost”
• WHEN TECH KNOWS YOU BETTER THAN YOU KNOW YOURSELF

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

• The Fallacies of Enterprise Computing
• 11 Fallacies of Distributed Computing
• Introducing .NET 5
• .NET Core is the Future of .NET
• End-to-End Encryption Isn’t as Safe as You Think – “The WhatsApp hack shows how supposedly secure messaging apps have a basic vulnerability”
• Amazon Workers Are Listening to What You Tell Alexa
• How to Track Your Kids (and Other People's Kids) With the TicTocTrack Watch

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.”

RIF Notes #51

"Every line of code represents an ethical and moral decision." - Grady Booch

• The 3 most effective ways to build trust as a leader
• Want to yank configuration values from your .NET Core apps? Here’s how to store and access them in Azure and AWS
• What is Blazor and what is Razor Components?
• Serverless Architectures
• Introduction to SQL for Cosmos DB
• Am I Unique?

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

• Why microservice is a horrible term – “because the term attempts to put the concept of size onto services”..exactly! I’m not a fan of the term microservices for the similar reasons.
• Why scrap scrappy? – “My suggestion: Resist the allure of large — there’s very little payback, especially if you artificially get there before you’re really ready.”
• test && commit || revert – TCR, by Kent Beck as alternative to TDD.
• Refactoring code that accesses external services
• Performance Improvements in ReSharper 2018.3
• Migrating from .NET to .NET Standard
• The Case for Value-Based Delivery