You don’t have to read it, but you just might learn something.
Leading Thought
Prime
Are Transformations Adding Fuel to the Fire?
There are some interesting thoughts here, and not just because I agree with a lot of them. The big takeaway for me is very much that Agile isn’t about going faster and faster – speed comes at a cost. Agile is about removing friction in many places so that teams can work better.
Absolutely give this a few minutes, then sit with it for awhile. If you read no other part, read the section The friction of predictability (though you really should read it all). While we all want to know the what and when, focusing too much on predictability in work lads to bad practices, from hiding work and bugs, to playing games with numbers. The important part is removing friction from delivery.
This stuff isn’t easy and we should stop treating it as such. Breaking things down and resolving dependencies aren’t just for software solutions. It works with people as well.
The DevOps Hangover
There is a lot of truth in this short article. We are seeing it in different places: companies going back on-premises from The Cloud, the swing back from microservices to more monolithic application, from large teams to smaller. While each of the these things have their place, the reality is that each of the from cases are behaviors that come from large budgets, and have caused problems that can be concealed by throwing more at them, whether it’s people, hardware, or services.
The trend now is to return to basics. Understanding how changes to code bases impact the bottom line negatively. How many extra service calls can be avoided? How do we scale down infrastructure? How do we make maintainable code that requires less guesswork and future debugging? While not explicit, there is an aspect that I would add: separating Dev from Ops in larger orgs so that there is more specialization and consistency leading to more stable systems. The idea of the full-stack dev, who does all the things for one low price has it’s drawbacks in that wide-T knowledge; maybe there is another swing that needs to happen: a return to a few generalists, more tall-T specialists, and optimization up and down the stack.
Every software company is asking its development team to cut infrastructure costs. Yet, the same problems remain: bad code creates blockages, outages, and inefficiencies that cost hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, to the business, annually.
Coming Soon
Juneteenth Conference
(June 15th and 16th | Chicago, IL and Virtual)
The conference to celebrate Black Excellence in technology, promote Black technology professionals, and to encourage future Black technologists to explore careers in the field is back! For $300 (in-person) or $100 (virtual), this is steal. Definitely give it a look.
Humble Bundles
Cybersecurity and Forensics Bundle
New offering from Humble Bundle benefitting Little Free Library – and, if you don’t know it’s there, there is an Adjust Donation button that will let you give more of the take to charity! For a minimum donation of $25 you get 19 items, including:
- Secrets of a Cyber Security Architect
- Cross-Site Scripting Attacks: Classification, Attack, and Countermeasures
- The Insider Threat: Assessment and Mitigation of Risks
- Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks: Classification, Attacks, Challenges and Countermeasures
- Behavioral Cybersecurity: Fundamental Principles and Applications of Personality Psychology
- And more!
The Complete Learn Coding MEGA Software Bundle
New offering from Humble Bundle benefitting Lotus Outreach International – and, if you don’t know it’s there, there is an Adjust Donation button that will let you give more of the take to charity! For a minimum donation of $20 you get 30 items, including:
- Responsive Web Design for Beginners
- JavaScript Programming for Beginners
- Intro to Java for Android Development
- iOS App Development for Beginners
- CSS Foundations
- HTML Foundations
- And more!
AI
Apple reportedly limits internal use of AI-powered tools like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot
This may be one of the most unsurprising headlines ever. Given the fierce competition here, the speculation that Apple is developing it’s own AI, as well as the issues companies like Samsung have had leaking data, a true revelation would be Apple going against the grain and fully embracing ChatGPT or CoPilot.
Other organizations including banks like Bank of America, Citi, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, and JPMorgan, as well as Walmart and telecom giant Verizon have also restricted their staff from accessing ChatGPT.
Why use of AI is a major sticking point in the ongoing writers’ strike
Interesting article here about the issues underlying the Writer’s Guild of AMerica (WGA) strike, and why this is an interesting test of AI’s use to automate work. Whether the work a person does is creative or not, the potential negative impact to the workforce is huge. A massive number of displaced workers is not only a problem for the workers themselves, but for society as a whole.
“The short-term key is who will control AI – labour or capital,” says Johnson. “If capital controls it, labour will lose big time and fast.”
Engineering
Dependency Composition
This is a really interesting, detailed breakdown of an approach to building an application in TypeScript “using partial applications to inject context into modules”. While TypeScript is the chosen language, the author uses a very functional approach to avoid coupling modules; he also makes a strong case when he chooses not to DRY up objects and instead allow for duplicated implementation.
Taking you step-by-step through the approach, with great detail on the decisions being made, this is absolutely worth your time to read if you build web applications. From Testing/TDD on into implementation, there is a lot here to digest and I plan to go through it again (probably a couple of times) to really understand it.
My 20 Year Career is Technical Debt or Deprecated
This was a fun walk down memory lane, and a great way to understand that everything we build in software becomes legacy and technical debt at some point. If you’ve been in software for any length of time, chances are you’ll find something here to reminisce about. If you’re newer to the profession, then take the advice given here: what you build today will get deleted; if you are truly pragmatic about it, then you hope that avery line of code you write will eventually disappear from the codebase because the system is valuable enough that it stays under active development. Eventually, we are all technical debt and deprecated.
However, nothing is technical debt because it isn’t perfect. There is no such thing as perfect. Over time what was perfect today won’t be perfect in the future. Learn to live with less than perfect.