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 …
Read moreThe service you build doesn’t do a thing. It participates in a thing.
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 …
Caring for software takes more knowledge than a single person can acquire. There’s the business knowledge that makes it useful, plus the languages and runtimes and infrastructure and deployment. Then there’s security, accessibility, user experience, each interface, availability, observability, scaling, performance, data modeling, testing, networking, etc etc. Every change to the software hits several of …
Developers talk about interfaces all the time. Even in the back end: APIs are crucial, because they let us connect our new programs into the world of existing software. They let us build on what exists. They let us build subsystems, and build higher-level systems using those. In real life, I talk about interfaces. An …
Read moreDeveloping software teaches us to design interfaces.
Useful terminology: my tools are either ready-to-hand, unready-to-hand, or present-at-hand. I can notice the switch and deal with it consciously.
Goals are for the smaller stuff,specifics of this week, todaybecause we can’t see far enoughto guess what new surprises laybeyond that. Top this nearest hilland pause to find the next clear way.A mountain in the distance stillcalls to us, and yet we staygrounded in the valley hereand set a goal not far away. Tomorrow, top …
Always consider your design a subsystem. Jabe Bloom When we build software, we aren’t building it in nowhere. We aren’t building a closed system that doesn’t interact with its environment. We aren’t building it for our own computer (unless we are; personal automation is fun). We are building it for a purpose. Chances are, we …
Feedback loops are essential to learning. In business, they’re essential to getting the product right. We need to know what the customers think, what they’re struggling with, what they value. There’s one department that has a lot of contact with customers. Whole conversations, where we can learn a lot about what frustrates people. Yet, customer …
Blog post: From Puzzles to Products Abstract What does it mean to grow from a new developer to a senior one? What is the difference between programs and software? I started my career solving puzzles in code. Then I added understanding about the business, and about running software in production, and about making that software …
Today in standup, a colleague reported that a GitHub isn’t sending the hooks it did last week, after we wrote code to handle it, and it’s a problem for us. “Did you contact GitHub?” “I asked around, and I heard they’re very unhelpful.” So no, he didn’t contact GitHub. The people writing that hook will …
Read moreGive me feedback that is qualitative, broad, and random