Back when software was a craft
Standardization turns a craft into a knowledge-based industry, says Tiago Forte. Has that happened to software, with open-source libraries as standards?
Grow to where we’re going
“Plants are movers…. Plants grow to where they’re going.” Frazier, P. & Jamone, Lorenzo & Althoefer, Kaspar & Calvo, Paco. (2020). Plant Bioinspired Ecological Robotics. Frontiers in Robotics and AI. 7. 10.3389/frobt.2020.00079. This is a keynote written originally for a private company. I’ll do it at conferences, including YOW! in September 2020. Short bite: In …
Define roles by what each person increasingly knows
Say you’re aiming for outcome-based product teams that write and operate software. Maybe you hire for roles in these teams like Software Developer, Product Owner, Designer, Tester. How do you define each role? We usually ask, what does each person do? A typical job description includes: what does the person do? What are they responsible …
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The visible lines of division are not the meaningful ones
Imagine you’ve never cut open a human body before. Nor seen a diagram drawn by someone who has. Back before anatomy textbooks, the organs and systems of the human body would not have been obvious. I imagine asking, what are the parts that make up a person? and getting: head, arms, legs, hands, feet, chest, …
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The service you build doesn’t do a thing. It participates in a thing.
Cognitive neuroscience likes to assign functions to parts of the brain. This bit does planning. This part does short term memory. This piece perceives faces. Does that bit really do planning? If you cut it out and held it, would it plan for you? No. And that other bit doesn’t perceive faces without messages from …
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Spring and JPA: use custom value types inside entities with a custom converter
If you want secure code, or code with fewer bugs, you want to track the kind of data you’re passing around. In your code, do not pass around strings or any other built-in built-in primitive type. Those are for the edges: we have to accept strings as input, we have to write VARCHAR to the …
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Fuzzy translucent background behind text in CSS
I like this enough that I’m putting it here for reference. If anyone tells me how to improve it, I’ll update it here. The goal is to get some text to have a blurry white background behind it, like this text here. That’s especially useful when there’s an image behind it. Look! A CSS custom …
motivate/enable
In the UberConf expert panel, someone (Travis) posed a question about “how do you motivate/enable [teams stuck in legacy] to start growing and continuously learning again?” Laine Vyvyan had a good answer: make it safe for them, and then show them it is safe now. Usually growth stops because new ideas are slapped down. When …
skills v. practices
When helping software development teams work more smoothly, we want to teach them TDD, DevOps, pairing, clean code, etc. Which of these are skills, and which are practices? Yes — they’re all both. Skills and practices aren’t separate; they’re a circle. Knowing how to do something gives you the option to practice it, which makes …
talk: Shaving the Golden Yak
Abstract Programming is a series of frustrations. Everything we do, we could do better or faster if we only had our tools set up just so. If our error messages were a little better, our code a little cleaner, our tests a lot wider. When we spend time on this, it’s known as “yak shaving,” …