You don’t have to read it, but you just might learn something.
Leading Thought
Prime
The Tyranny of “The Plan”
This is a great talk from Mary Popendeick at the UK LEan Conference 2009. She talks not only about why scheduling fails, but also why a pull systems better serve reaching goals. From the building of the Empire State building to the development of the Polaris submarine, there are commonalities that point to the futility of an upfront schedule.
If you build software, this is a great watch to understand how to be more Agile.
If the reality doesn’t match the schedule, then the conclusion should be, the schedule was wrong, instead of somebody didn’t figure out how to follow the plan, didn’t try hard enough.
Want more productivity? Help everyone think like a developer
There are some interesting takes in here about how businesses can be more productive. While my initial thought was how is this different from DevOps or DevSecOps?, which has been around for quite awhile. I think the points here are around the difficulties of culture in creating effective roles where everyone is able to do what they need to, regardless of title, to get things done.
While I have mixed feelings about the forced jack-of-all-trades developer (or full-stack if you will), who also handles infosec, data, and infrastructure, I think that if these things can grow organically within a dev, team, or other role, then there is a strong point for allowing it and ensuring that compensation reflects the responsibility. It’s never a bad thing to have ops folks who can code and remove friction for devs. It’s rarely a bd thing for devs to be able to handle secure infrastructure. And, it’s never a bad thing to have specialists in any group that keep the broad-T folks from doing something really harmful. If you want to go fast, remove the friction.
What it’s like to work with ADHD
I was evaluated for ADD about two years ago and came up borderline (I got tested because all of the symptoms my daughter shows felt very familiar). This maybe/maybe not diagnosis is really frustrating simply because every time someone with a positive diagnosis speaks out, it resonates all over again. This article is no exception.
Beyond the things I see in myself in the article, I see how I respond to my daughter’s struggles even knowing her diagnosis. The constant SOS (or shiny object syndrome), the difficulty remembering tasks, and on and on. It’s frustrating for me as a parent, but I know that it’s even worse for her, and this had some real punches to the gut.
If you have, feel like you have, or know someone who struggles with ADD, you owe it to yourself to read this article.
Turning to me in tears she asked, “Is it because you’re just not challenged?” I was smart, so I said yes. That wasn’t the real problem, but I didn’t have a name for the real problem. I wasn’t old or brave enough to tell her I had pleaded with myself more times than she ever could. That I was queasy with the premonition of a lifetime spent sensing other people’s disappointment.
They catch squid for the world’s table. But deckhands on Chinese ships pay a deadly price
I have to say that I always wondered what beriberi was whenever I’d hear it in a movie or TV show, but never too the time to look it up (I’d have spelled it phonetically, anyway). Turns out it’s a completely preventable condition caused by a lack of Thiamine in the diet. Shouldn’t even be a thing nowadays, what with vitamins and available foods – unlees, of course, you’re serving aboard a squid boat for two years without seeing either port or fresh vegetables.
This is a pretty horrifying story about another group of people you probably never think about, coming from countries with few opportunities, trying to get a bit ahead. The unfortunate reality is that they become captive labor, slaves in all but name, obligated, in many cases, to finish their contracts before they ever get paid. And that miniscule wage also comes with a lot of charges incurred both while working on the ships and to return home.
Whether you eat squid or not, this is an article that should be read by everyone to understand the lives – and desperation – that others experience in the name of cheap food.
Various laws in the U.S. are meant to prevent products tied to forced labor from entering the American economy, but they are ineffective with seafood because there is no comprehensive import tracking system.
Integrating more of this work is stymied by the fact that IT professionals are compensated and mandated with single-purpose roles, Gramajo explained. “What I’ve seen is some teams with hundreds of projects and thousands of developers, you have different scopes and different capabilities. But the development teams can’t pick up and continue the work of security, get other things done, or add modules for resiliency. The context is the developer is working on this project work that their getting paid for, and can’t switch the entire thing around. And that’s creating friction between the development group and other teams.”
When the natural gas industry used the playbook from Big Tobacco
This is a pretty interesting read from Jonathan Levy, Professor and Chair, Department of Environmental Health, Boston University. Whether or not you think the idea of banning gas stoves is right or not, it’s important to get multiple views of a subject to understand the issues.
That said, the science is pretty strong here to shw that burning natural gas for cooking – especially when not well vented – carries risks with it, including asthma. When I lived in California, every place I lived had a vent to the outside, that was usually run when cooking. This can potentially mitigate some of the issues. Now, however, living in Michigan, Neither place that I’ve lived in with gas stoves had external vents at all, and the stoves vent to the kitchen. With kids, this really has me questioning if it’s worth keeping a gas stove in place, even though I hate cooling on electric stoves.
Given that we have seen many industries, from tobacco to oil, bury or muddy findings that would cut into their business, it’s not much of a stretch to believe that the natural gas industry would do something similar. Read the article – you just may find yourself asking more questions.
Nitrogen dioxide is known to adversely affect respiratory health. Inhaling it causes respiratory irritation and can worsen diseases such as asthma. This is a key reason why the US Environmental Protection Agency established an outdoor air quality standard for nitrogen dioxide in 1971.
No such standards exist for indoor air, but as the EPA now acknowledges, nitrogen dioxide exposure indoors is also harmful.
Humble Bundles
Microservices Book Bundle
New offering from Humble Bundle benefitting Direct Relief – 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 16 titles, including:
- Implementing Event-Driven Microservices Architecture in .NET 7
- Microservices Communication in .NET Using gRPC
- Microservices with Go
- Building and Delivering Microservices on AWS
- Microservices Design Patterns in .NET
- And more!
Ruby on Rails Book Bundle
New offering from Humble Bundle benefitting Active Minds – 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 $18 you get 13 titles, including:
- Programming Ruby 1.9 & 2.0 (4th Edition)
- Agile Web Development with Rails 7
- Docker for Rails Developers
- Effective Testing with RSpec 3
- Modern Front-End Development for Rails, Second Edition 2nd Edition
- And more!
Engineering
Preventing breaking changes in .NET class libraries
I love it when I stumble across a tool I didn’t know existed, or that I need! This is a great write-up on the Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.PublicApiAnalyzers NuGet package, which helps to identify shipped and unshipped api signatures at design time. Now, it seems like the overall process to track the api may be a little bit cumbersome but, given the benefits, I think this is a worthwhile trade-off.
If you build libraries in C# – especially publicly available ones – and you haven’t been exposed to this tool yet, you definitely want to give this a read and do some exploring. It may just help you prevent that next tech incident.
UI/|UX
Transition animations: a practical guide
Nice, clear write-up here about different animated transitions and how they can be used either singly or in combination. When done poorly, animation can definitely be much more of a distraction, but when done well, the effects feel so natural as to almost go unnoticed.
If you are new to UI/UX work, this is definitely worth a read, especially since there are good references supplied. If you are a vet, you may likely know or have used many, if not all, of them before but you never know what you may find new or useful for a deeper understanding.