In business, we want to focus on our core domain, and let everything else be “good enough.” We need accounting, payroll, travel. But we don’t need those to be special if our core business is software for hospitals. As developers, we want to focus on changing our software, because that is our core work. We …
We build our software in a particular world, a world of technologies that we link together. We choose a programming system (language, runtime, framework), libraries, and environment. We integrate components: databases, logging, and many different services. Perhaps we built it on Java 8 running on VMs in our datacenter, connecting to a proprietary queuing service …
Here’s a lovely graphic from the folks at Intercom. It describes the difference between what companies sell and what people buy. We don’t want the tool, we want what we can do with the tool. Take it further – maybe what that skateboarder really wants is: the high fives at the end. Our accomplishments feel …
(this is a transcription of the talk by the same name. Here is a video.) Collaboration is crucial in software teams – and not only among people. We need our software, our tools, and our automations to collaborate as well. But what does that mean? I have four prerequisites for you here, and then four precautions …
A quick definition, without the narrative Symmathecist: (sim-MATH-uh-sist) an active participant in a symmathesy. A symmathesy (sim-MATH-uh-see, coined by Nora Bateson) is a learning system made of learning parts. Software teams are each a symmathesy, composed of the people on the team, the running software, and all their tools. The people on the team learn …
Software Development has moved forward a lot recently. Both on the code side and the runtime side, we’ve had huge advances. we’ve seen more advances in writing code and in running it, than in the bridge from written to running We have way better languages and frameworks for writing applications now. For instance, JavaScript, JQuery, and …
Yesterday I was ready to get some changes into master, so I merged in the latest and opened a PR. But NO, the build on my pull request broke.The error was: ERROR: (jsdoc-format) /long/path/to/file.ts[52, 1]: asterisks in jsdoc must be alignedERROR: (jsdoc-format) /long/path/to/file.ts[53, 1]: asterisks in jsdoc must be alignedERROR: (jsdoc-format) /long/path/to/file.ts[54, 1]: asterisks in …
Building a new automation to give power to my team At Atomist, we supply a GraphQL endpoint to reveal links between commits, builds, deploys, and people. Internally, we also use GraphQL to access data in Neo4J. To do that, we need to deploy a schema definition (IDL) to the Neo4j GraphQL extension. Software evolves from simple …
automation changes the rules we play by Fast v Safe Tradeoffs are a fact of life. Choose between safety and speed, stability and flexibility. More of one sacrifices the other. fast or safe, we are somewhere on that spectrum I remember a time when this described our decisions about software deployments. Deployments caused problems, so we did fewer …