“Pull requests have also become the place where the team trains each other peer-to-peer, partially subsuming the role of manager as trainer. It’s one of the primary places where the team’s culture develops, especially if the team is distributed. It’s also the de facto information radiator for a development team, the best way to know how a product and codebase is changing over time is to be inside the code review loop.”
tags: management
“When the business side “wins”, the developers end up in a death march. When development concerns outweigh business ones, you end up blowing the budget and deadline. Either way you’re broken. Successful software managers find ways to be flexible; to bend without breaking and to resolve the tension gradually. Servant leadership can be a guide to finding this flexibility.”
tags: programming
Aaron Longwell | Why Software Development Requires Servant Leaders | Culture Foundry
“The invention of the two day Scrum master training course is probably one of the worst things Scrum has done to agile. If you look at responsibilities, a good scrum master needs to be a strong technical manager with a huge grasp of organisational change, but the role is often fulfilled by a non-technical person with limited management experience from the product side of the organisation who cannot fulfil all of those responsibilities. And the idea that two days of training is sufficient to perfect and advocate major organisational change is laughable. (Indeed, most decent training companies would agree with this, and have plenty more training to sell you.)”
tags: agile
“Let’s chat about the “should I rent or buy?” question using logic, math and reason, rather than ill-informed clichés.”
tags: finance
“There are several articles out there that talk about testing anti-patterns in the software development process. Most of them however deal with the low level details of the programming code, and almost always they focus on a specific technology or programming language.
In this article I wanted to take a step back and catalog some high-level testing anti-patterns that are technology agnostic. Hopefully you will recognize some of these patterns regardless of your favorite programming language.”
tags: qa
“Configuration has always been a challenge for most developers especially when they are starting off. Getting that development environment ready to start coding your ‘visionary’ application is almost equivalent to getting your room clean and tidy before your parents visit you so you can skip the time they would normally utilize to make you aware of ‘what’ a responsible adult you have grown into.”
tags: react
Looking back at the Zork I code, and what accounted for handling inventory back and the day. Interesting and frustrating all at the same time…
tags: history
Some more signals that ArsDigita University was ahead of its time.
tags: education
“I’ve read some comments on Reddit and HackerNews along the lines of: “What an obvious mistake! How was it even possible they missed this?” (Ignoring that the “obvious” vulnerability was introduced in January and only now discovered.)
When I see responses like this, I know the people commenting are not professional developers. For a serious developer, the reaction is instead: damn, that was a dumb mistake. I’m glad I wasn’t the one who made it.
Mistakes of this sort are routinely made in programming. All programs carry the risk of developer error. We have to throw off the mindset of “if they were just more careful, this wouldn’t have happened.” At a certain scale, carefulness is not enough.”
tags: ethereum
A hacker stole $31M of Ether — how it happened, and what it means for Ethereum
“To be provocative: No one ever fired someone too soon.”
tags: management