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.”