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• Senior software engineers, power and freedom

  This is a follow-up article to my recent article on Senior Software Engineers. The reason why I’m doing a follow-up so soon is because some interesting and useful points came up in a Twitter conversation about it, and I want to capture and build on those.  The points concern different ways of looking at power and freedom.  I’m no sociologist or psychologist, but as ever I’m not letting my lack of knowing what I’m talking about get in the way of waffling on the Internet. In-groups and out-groups Before I get into the main part of this article, I ought to fill in a gap I introduced in the previous article.  Something that struck me in the Twitter conversation was that I had been ignoring out-groups.  I had been defining relationships purely in terms of formal org chart type things, such as job title, years of experience etc.  I think that unfortunately there’s a meta point here – I’m in so many in-groups that I had forgotten that being in an out-group can be a problem. TL;DR explanation of in- / out-groups in case you need it: an in-group is my tribe, and the out-group is people not in my tribe, for however you define tribe.  The division into in-group and out-group isn’t necessarily a problem (for instance, supporters of different sports teams), but power, status etc. can go with group membership.  So, women can be an out-group, or people of a particular religion, or neuro-diverse people etc. This adds[…]

  16.06.2021 | 7:38 קרא עוד...

• ABC TDD API

  Last night I attended How to TDD a REST API, a webinar by Gil Zilberfeld. In it, Gil described an experiment he's running to try to use test-driven development for a service built with Spring Boot in Java. As part of this, he is building unit and API tests at the same time.The code is available in GitHub and you can follow the kindergarten moves he talked us through by reading the src and main directories in parallel in numerical order.What insights did he get from his experience? Well, as you might expect, with all the additional weight of a framework and internal and external dependencies, there is a lot of friction. But he still thinks there is still value in using TDD, or perhaps its spirit. His recommendations include: small stepsa hexagonal architecture for aggressive abstractionvery thin adapters (code that interfaces your code to the external world)code and data that is framework agnostic as far as possiblesmall stepsrefactoring eagerly for readabilityrefactoring on red sometimescommitting (and reverting) frequently and at a fine granularitysmall stepsIf you're wondering why small steps is on the list so many times it's because that point was hammered home. It is easy to go wrong so protect yourself with small steps. In fact, adjust your model of TDD as a cycle of red, green, refactor to be something more like red, shuffle, red, shuffle, refactor, shuffle, green, refactor.I think it will be interesting to see the development of strategies for testing a given piece of functionality at[…]

  16.06.2021 | 12:51 קרא עוד...

• Habits and Shu Ha Ri

  Whatever happened to Shu Ha Ri? It was the bees-knees of learning processes about 4 years ago. Now crickets...or perhaps I'm not moving in the right circles. Anywhooo, had a lunch chat with the lovely Paul Hughes from CultureAmp. (If you're wondering, he ate healthy carrots and tuna, I scoffed down a cheeky carbonara left over). We were talking about the concept of embedding a scaffolding for quality that teams can pull down on as needed. I mentioned the concept of atomic habits wrt to quality with the aim of improving quality without the expectation of having highly motivated teams. Cos lets face it, even the best of us are not motivated all the time. Me? I love running, but I hate getting out for those first 100 metres, and when it's cold its super hard to get out there. I've learned to create strategies and structures even when I feel unmotivated. So let's make it easy to adopt habits that help improve quality without having to think twice about it. But as Paul pointed out, the problem with doing stuff without thinking twice is sometimes, you should think twice. For example, when it comes to risk which is pretty context dependent. So how do you encourage people to think about risk slowly but think fast about other things? Perhaps I mused, its ok to not be perfect on the whole risk thing to start with. After all, risk is something you come to respect through experience. Some-one can tell[…]

  16.06.2021 | 12:35 קרא עוד...

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