Why we have containers
One day a baby app was completed. It was so excited to run! But where would it run? and how? Its problems are only just beginning.
Keep your experiments separate
When I make a toy app for my own learning, I start small and add one feature at a time, each time figuring out some new piece about the framework or language I’m working in. There’s a point in adding features where they start to make each other harder. One time I made a Cat …
Five Measurements You Should Make and Then Ignore (Plus One to Watch Intently)
Are we succeeding as a software team?Well, if our job were feature delivery, we could look at the parade of JIRA tickets in our “complete” column. That is only part of our job, though.The purpose of a software team is to provide valued capabilities to customers, internal or external. To do that, our software has …
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Every SaaS Integration needs an Upstream Point of Contact
Can you see a pattern in these examples? SendGrid sends emails for you. You provide it with a webhook URL. It uses the webhook to “call you back” about what happens with those emails, like when they are dropped because your request was invalid. On AWS, you need to listen to an event bus if …
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startSpan vs startActiveSpan in OpenTelemetry JS
TL;DR: startSpan is easier and measures a duration. Use it if your work won’t create any subspans. startActiveSpan requires that you pass a callback for the work in the span, and then any spans created during that work will be children of this active span. I’m instrumenting a Node.js app with OpenTelemetry, and adding some …
To share the work, share the decisions
We get better decisions by forming a shared (overlapping) understanding. We do that with participation from everyone who changes the software.
Starter Elm app that deploys on Netlify
It also works with VSCode devcontainers and on GitPod. Because Step 1 in any new project is a reproducible development environment, and Step 2 is get it in production. Step 3 is implement something. Copy this code: systemsthinking-dev/poker-in-elm at starter (github.com) This is my accomplishment for the day, so I’m here to share it with …
Copy the Questions, not the Answers
Copying someone else’s team structure is like seeking the phone in the bathroom closet every time.
Tracing makes a bug easy to spot
Today, I found a bug before I noticed it. Like, it was subtle, and so I wasn’t quite sure I saw it–maybe I hadn’t hit refresh yet? Later, I looked at the trace of my function and boom, there was a clear bug. Here’s the function with the bug. It responds to a request to …
Software development pushes us to get better as people
Have you ever been on a really good software team? There’s this feeling of connectedness, of shared purpose. We know what we’re building, and we are skilled at building it together. This kind of team can grow some amazing software. When we work at making our team great like this, we look for new ways …
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