jessitron As a software engineer, what is your job? and what is your value? On many teams, the work is “add features to this codebase.” We congratulate teams for moving JIRA tickets from “defined” to “delivered.” Meanwhile, the value to the business depends on value to the customers, or to people or software who in turn … Read moreProduct teams own capabilities, not (only) code.
Today I need to do some calculations for an article, so I want to persist them. The best way to do this is in a notebook, in Python. This Jupyter notebook thing that is exactly what I need. And VSCode recently added support for it! The installation instructions for Jupyter are all like “anaconda” and … Read moreMinimum path to a Jupyter Notebook in VSCode
We talk about “software products” and “product teams.” What does this even mean, “product?” It is not the definition I learned in school. Economics 101: the output of the economy is “goods and services.” Goods, also called “products,” are physical items that you can buy, take home, and have. Like, if you buy a rug, … Read moreWhat is this “product” you speak of?
This is an experience report for my future reference (and yours). The OpenTelemetry Collector is useful for receiving trace data in whatever format and exporting it to the back-end of your choice for storage and querying. For instance, I wanted to receive traces over HTTP/JSON from this sneaky browser extensionLINK and send them to Honeycomb. … Read moreRun an OpenTelemetry Collector locally in Docker
TL;DR: When different parts of an organization need to coordinate, it seems like a good idea to help them coordinate smoothly and frequently. Don’t. Help them coordinate less — more explicitly, less often. Software systems get big, and they have lots of parts, and those parts need to talk to each other. Maybe we’re building … Read moreBetter coordination, or better software?
TL;DR: Projects ask teams do what is asked of them; Products ask teams to invent their work. This requires a different way of seeing the world, and not everyone can do it yet. Software is not an up-front investment that pays off over its use. Software is an ongoing concern, an intricate piece of a … Read moreProject to Product asks more of our software, and more of us
What is happening in production? Distributed tracing can help you find out. But it’s one thing to instrument, another to use it. Here’s a short (6m) video that asks “Why is this so slow?” See three quick ways to get answers in Honeycomb. If you want to follow along and play with the same data … Read moreThree Easy Ways to Use Distributed Traces
Just now, Avdi had a miserable experience buying curtains. He went to pick up an order that he placed last night, but Lowe’s didn’t have it. The order was sent to the wrong store and it was a huge pain to figure out. Software is hard to get right. And every time we don’t, customers … Read morethe Enterprise eats Software
Keynote at YOW! December 2021: Software design: Beyond Boxes and Lines – Jessica Kerr – YouTube Slides Latest: https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_l6zV8Lg=/ References Domain Driven Design, by Eric Evans (book) Learn Wardley Mapping, by Simon Wardley; documented by Ben Mosier (site) Team Topologies, by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais (book) Grokking Simplicity, by Eric Normand (book) Functional Programming … Read moreSoftware Design: Beyond Boxes and Lines
If ya know how to do it, stick with the bureaucracy. If you’re building software, it’s always new — you need a generative org with a resilient structure.