Nappi Sight

“There are no wrong answers in architecture, only expensive ones” – Mark Richards The four engineering metrics that will streamline your software delivery - Stack Overflow Blog Does ES6 make JavaScript frameworks obsolete? - Stack Overflow Blog Code quality: a concern for businesses, bottom lines, and empathetic programmers - Stack Overflow Blog Best practices for REST API security: Authentication and authorization - Stack Overflow Blog Why Intuitive Troubleshooting Has Stopped Working for You Scatter-Gather Gatekeeping, Passion, Career, and Life What Color is Your Function? How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum Productivity vs. Guilt and Self-Loathing Heuristics for Effective Software Development Organizations: A continuously evolving list.* THE VALUE OF SPEED Getting Started with Agility: Essential Reading Stop Technical Debt Before It Damages Your Company XP as an Incentive System – Kent Beck – X

I’m sure I’m not the first to make some of these observations about the microservices fad, but here’s my perspective nonetheless. Microservices are definitely all the rage, and proffered as an obvious solution to the dreaded monolith. But I'm not so sure it's all that obvious. As another swing at service-orientation, which is really about composability and modularity, it has the same appeal as previous iterations. What I find disappointing about microservices is the emphasis on technologies over decomposition techniques. Its more concerned with how to run and deploy services than it is about how to identify the proper boundaries and granularity of services. It tells you how to run a service, without telling you what a service should be or do. Even when it comes to technologies, it's not a no brainer. More services and more technologies (containers, orchestrators) often means more complexity to manage, and a system that is harder to reason about. That complexity manage

“Things that can’t go on forever don’t” – Stein’s Law This will prove to be the most shocking episode ever, as it will be the last of the Reading is Fundamental series. Hackers Breach Thousands of Security Cameras, Exposing Tesla, Jails, Hospitals Has the Pandemic Transformed the Office Forever? - What’s an office for? Is it a place for newbies to learn from experienced colleagues? A way for bosses to oversee shirkers? A platform for collaboration? A source of friends and social life? A respite from the family? A reason to leave the house? Gab Has Been Breached #NoAccountability Experience Reports: Before and After Shape Up Clean Coders Planning Poker by Micah Martin BeckDesignRules Verica - Security Chaos Engineering Report Why I Barely Mention Velocity Anymore America's Most Hated Office Jargon Russell L Ackoff From Mechanistic to Systemic thinking   Left over quotes “We are often more frightened than hurt; and we suffer m

Back and my undergraduate days, I discovered the inescapability of mechanistic determinism. I even wrote my senior thesis in philosophy on the topic or determinism and Laplace's demon . Although determinism appears to be inarguably true, I never took it much further in explaining what the implications were for free will, morality and responsibility. I had a notion that chaos theory might explain the gap between the truth of determinism and the limits of predictability. That lack of predictability was where free will dwelled, but it no more undermined determinism than the inability to predict the weather indicated consciousness in clouds. Sam Harris has been putting forth a compelling account of those implications for a while, and his latest podcast is a 45 minute walk-through of his full argument. Well worth the time.

The role of a software architect varies between companies as do the qualifications for the title. Having carried the software architect title for years, I've recently had cause to reflect how I've operated and what that implies about my philosophy on the role. Much criticism is levied against ivory tower architects who produce "dreamy architectures that are detached from IT, business and budgetary realities" or the title inflation that makes architects indistinguishable from "most senior engineer". For me, I've found balancing both to be the most effective. The architect needs to be able to develop architecture, designs and plans that are both forward thinking but also constrained by what's practical, and what's truly needed. A good way to know what's practical and required is to spend time in the trenches, likely as the most senior engineer. Playing both roles creates an evolutionary feedback loop from design to implementation and back

It may have taken me a while to get on the binge watching bandwagon that everyone else seemed to start with the first of the lockdowns. I’ve watched some pretty good shows lately, which reminded me of many of the other shows I’ve really liked.  Here’s my recommended list, in rough chronological order, of when I saw them not necessarily when they aired. Warrior The Boys The Mandalorian The Expanse The Watchmen Kingdom Vikings The Walking Dead The Last Kingdom Boardwalk Empire Justified Game of Thrones The Wire Entourage True Detective (Season 1) Marco Polo Sons of Anarchy Breaking Bad True Blood Deadwood Battlestar Galactica Farscape Spartacus Rome Firefly The Shield The Sopranos Six Feed Under Babylon 5

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system” - Galls Law The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is Probably Not Real Why Etsy Sucks (and why good markets don’t) Cisco engineer resigns then nukes 16k WebEx accounts, 456 VMs Mind the Moat, a 7 Powers Review Jeffrey Paul: Your Computer Isn't Yours Shift IT from projects to products: Part 1- What is a product? Stop Asking for Feedback Are We Really Engineers?

"Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else." -Eagleson's Law Announcing .NET 5.0 Troy Hunt: Humans are Bad at URLs and Fonts Don’t Matter Solid Relevance Options, Not Roadmaps - Signal v. Noise How We Ended up with Git Facebook CCPA compliance challenges: Limited Data Use We Hacked Apple for 3 Months: Here’s What We Found (samcurry.net) Dare to be Good Enough—You'll be Happier for it | 8th Light

"A management obsessed with productivity usually has little patience for the quiet time essential to profound creativity." —Gordon MacKenzie Solving Rubik’s Cube with a Robot Hand Arrested Japanese stalker used pupil image reflections - A Japanese man arrested on suspicion of stalking a female pop idol had looked at reflections of her pupils in photos she shared on social media and used Google Street View to find where she lived Self-Organization - Scary but Powerful Sustaining Performance Under Extreme Stress Reimagining virtual collaboration for the future of work and learning Lightweight Technology Governance Corporate psychopaths common and can wreak havoc in business, researcher says – They are on to me. Adapting #Accelerate to Development

"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 Advocates on Rider – Uncovering the IDE That Gets You Places – Webinar Recording Designing for a Future That’s Hard to Imagine Story Points Revisited – “I like to say that I may have invented story points, and if I did, I’m sorry now” When Tech Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself Software architecture as a function of trust Mirror your iOS Device Screen on Windows with the free 5KPlayer Amazon Honeycode Scientists used IBM's quantum computer to reverse time, possibly breaking a law of physics Tech Sector Job Interviews Assess Anxiety, Not Software Skills – “A new study from NCSU and Microsoft finds that the technical interviews currently used in hiring

“teams at Amazon are long lived service teams. Amazon does NOT do “projects”. Funding is continuous. This ensures attention to operational quality, reduces tech debt, avoids lock-in to legacy technologies” – Adrian Cockcroft Developer Velocity: How software excellence fuels business performance    The theory of constraints Visual Studio Codespaces Creating an event-driven architecture out of existing, non-event-driven systems The Majestic Monolith can become The Citadel. Working remotely builds organizational resiliency Let's Stop the 5G Hysteria: Understanding Hoaxes and Disinformation Campaigns

“With the possible exception of the four #Accelerate metrics, a metrics driven approach to evaluation is rarely effective. As Deming says: It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – a costly myth." - Allen Holub Spotify doesn’t use “the Spotify model” - "the Spotify model is revealed as a collection of cross-functional teams with too much autonomy and a poor management structure. Don’t fall for it" The Elephant in the Architecture - why business value should be treated as an architectural attribute Istio as an Example of When Not to Do Microservices How remote work impacts collaboration: findings from our team Quarantine work is not Remote work Nullable Reference Types: Migrating a Codebase – A Look at New Language Features in C# 8 ReSharper Ultimate 2020.1: Improved Support for C# 8.0 and C++20, Dataflow Analysis of Integer Values, and Much More Patterns for Managing Source Code Br

"Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else." -Eagleson's Law Announcing .NET 5.0 Troy Hunt: Humans are Bad at URLs and Fonts Don’t Matter Solid Relevance Options, Not Roadmaps - Signal v. Noise How We Ended up with Git Facebook CCPA compliance challenges: Limited Data Use We Hacked Apple for 3 Months: Here’s What We Found (samcurry.net) Dare to be Good Enough—You'll be Happier for it | 8th Light

"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 Advocates on Rider – Uncovering the IDE That Gets You Places – Webinar Recording Designing for a Future That’s Hard to Imagine Story Points Revisited – “I like to say that I may have invented story points, and if I did, I’m sorry now” When Tech Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself Software architecture as a function of trust Mirror your iOS Device Screen on Windows with the free 5KPlayer Amazon Honeycode Scientists used IBM's quantum computer to reverse time, possibly breaking a law of physics Tech Sector Job Interviews Assess Anxiety, Not Software Skills – “A new study from NCSU and Microsoft finds that the technical interviews currently used in hiring for many software engin

“teams at Amazon are long lived service teams. Amazon does NOT do “projects”. Funding is continuous. This ensures attention to operational quality, reduces tech debt, avoids lock-in to legacy technologies” – Adrian Cockcroft Developer Velocity: How software excellence fuels business performance    The theory of constraints Visual Studio Codespaces Creating an event-driven architecture out of existing, non-event-driven systems The Majestic Monolith can become The Citadel. Working remotely builds organizational resiliency Let's Stop the 5G Hysteria: Understanding Hoaxes and Disinformation Campaigns