Gareth Hughes

Day 2 at #LeadDevLondon LeadDev What a great conference! I'm exhausted. More fantastic talks today and I got to meet loads more exciting people (hi to you all!). Again too many talks to comment on individually, so again I'm going to pick out themes. 1. How do you make decisions? This seems to have been a running theme across all three days, but there were great talks about it on day 2. The first thing is you are going to need to notice that you are making a decision at all and take a moment to step back. Things to weight up: - Do you have existing biases? - Have you stepped back far enough to consider all the options? Throwing in some wild options is a good way to open it up. - What are the upsides? - What are the risks? - Who needs to buy into the decision? (Not just your line, but also other teams who's support you are going to need, or customers/teams that you want to use the output). - Do you have the skills? Or are they skills that your team would like to gain? - What are the maintenance costs? If this is a migration are you really going to be able to get rid of the legacy system? How quickly? - What are the repercussions for other teams/areas? - How are you going to get feedback as the project progresses? Metrics? People? - Above all, is this going to be fun? As you go through all those questions and indeed the project be curious, humble and empathetic. 2. Humans > machines, metrics, process.......... If you are putting people first you probably aren't going to go too far wrong. That isn't to say there isn't a place for all those other things, but they are there to assist people, not the other way around. If people are giving you a clear signal, you better listen to it. 3. Finally some practical advice from the bug all stars talk: - Be explicit in your APIs, make it super clear exactly what parameters/outputs are. - Get help whatever help you can to validate your code, whether that is from people, or from tools. - Don't try to solve difficult problems that have already been solved, use existing hardened libraries. Thanks to all the speakers/organisers, you were amazing. Thanks as well to my LeadDev buddies: Jen Kitson, Yanqing Cheng, Alice Twist, Daniel Phillips and Macauley Davy, sorry I didn't catch you all for the photo before you left. Finger's crossed I'll be back next year!

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Have you used Wardley Mapping in your teams? Maps can be used to help you find a route to your destination. Many of our other diagrams in technology either document things as they are, or describe an ideal future state. Wardley maps can help you leave that 2 hour meeting with clear next steps. They also help us ride the architect elevator up a few floors and tell compelling stories to our business stakeholders about why all this Serverless modernization stuff matters to them. In the new episode of Serverless Craic, David Anderson, Michael O'Reilly and Mark McCann talk about their experience after a decade of using Wardley Maps to get buy in, and go on to execute some of the most successful Serverless First transformations anywhere on AWS. Well worth a listen, and I’m looking forward to part 2.2.

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Since the introduction of the Delivery API in Umbraco 12, the amazing Umbraco community has been asking a bunch of questions on how to do this and that with the API. A lot of those questions have led to a better API feature set and/or improved documentation 🚀 A few have not (yet) made it into the official docs. I have put together a blog post describing some of the most interesting/useful, undocumented extension points in the Delivery API. 👉 https://lnkd.in/dNRVh3hn #umbraco #headless

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Here's a concise representation of your ML platform, courtesy of Laszlo Sragner.

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I'm observing a team writing code as an ensemble without TDD. I am selfishly delighted in the confirmation of how valuable TDD is to me as I use it. The team is implementing a new function that's doing list of list manipulation and returning something. They are all over the place with naming things, creating objects, streaming, mapping, flattening maps, return object, variables, naming...so many squirrels. Too many squirrels to even really focus on "what's the simplest first thing we could do?" TDD is so much more than writing a test first. It's a framework that helps me focus, prioritize, structure, and order my thoughts. Test Driven Development is an immensely helpful design and focus tool. I should also note, that I am beginning of working with this team and meeting them where they are. #codelife #devlife #TDD #testdrivendevelopment #unittesting #designthinking #problemsolving #structuredthinking #focus #mindset #toomanysquirrels #codingchaos

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Is anyone else finding the options for wrapping automation in a friendly interface really lacking? Jenkins is far too much effort, rundeck doesn't live up to it's promise. octopus deploy tries to do too many things and doesn't quite meet this need, other CICD pipeline providers are too rolled up in a strict linear pipeline/gitops workflow that doesn't always fit the needs of the business...

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Just got a chance to listen to Laura Tacho's talk from LeadDev London, "Measure for Change" covering why you need both qualitative and quantitative data when measuring #developerproductivity. When people measure developer productivity, it's often for the reason of reporting the measurements upstream to make someone above them happy, and to validate that they're doing their manager/director/VP job well. 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗺𝗲𝗮𝘀𝘂𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗯𝗲 𝘂𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗯𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝗱𝗲, but the improvements themselves must be made by the people doing the work, not those observing them. "We want teams to use data, not just view it. We can do that when we mix quantitative and qualitative data together, because what we don't want is numbers without context..." By involving teams in the measurement process, and giving data back to them, you can drive real change, as opposed to working from a metaphorical box in the sky to report to someone even further away from the work being done. https://lnkd.in/gvK3fX7H

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When assembling a product team ask the technical team members 'if you have 3 potential features how will you choose between them?' 'how will you choose between helping your team mate versus focusing on your work' 'how will you navigate the trade off between code quality and moving fast and testing' Smart. Pawel Brodzinski at #laldn24

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On a lightweight project where you don't want the overheads of Celery, SQS, daemons and the likes, it can sometimes feel like you're passing the burden onto the user. On a simple Django project where we want to send a bunch of emails after a user submits a form, my team have had success with the lightweight package: django-after-response. Render your response to the user and defer processing heavier tasks until AFTER the response. This has been a rare "quick win" on this small project, and no performance optimisation is too small. Don't leave your users waiting. More about the package here: https://lnkd.in/dVPvSYwv

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I think I may be a little late to the party here but, blimey Charlie testcontainers.com is super useful for your integration tests. 1) I can see why Docker snapped up the developers, AtomicJar 2) testcontainers.com may make building integration tests just a little too easy

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Yesterday we: Deployed a couple UI/UX polish features at 11 am Deployed upgrades to Frigade and PostHog at 2 pm Deployed onboarding revamp at 5 pm Deployed document import at 7 pm Deployed a hotfix (for onboarding) at 1 am yesterday (well... this morning) We ❤️ moving fast but the Joggr team is ready for the weekend so we can relax... and switch to working on open-source projects 😂 #movefastdontbreakthings #deployments #weekend #nodejs #javascript #opensource #codingonabeach

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I've written a short blog post about MVP's as I'm a big fan of them (done right). What does an MVP mean to you? I'd love to hear your thoughts!   #mvp #agile   https://lnkd.in/gP2XFfxn

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“I’ve been saying this for a whole year and no one listens, then the CEO said the same thing last week and everyone is acting like it was the most brilliant thing they ever heard” A QA engineer said that at a company I worked for in the past and it cracked me up because it’s so true of life in general. People are quick to dismiss advice that doesn’t come from a “high authority” or “reputable source”, that's just how we are wired to filter information. But if you hire really smart, proactive people and then reduce their voice to a whisper, your company is going to suck. This is why important that leaders do three things: 1. Listen to your employees and help amplify their voice → If you spot a great idea, give credit and then use your clout to push it to make it happen 2. Make them a higher authority, put them in charge of things, expand their remit → It doesn’t matter if you hire the top talent in the world if you box them in a tiny space or put them under management of someone who is not qualified to understand the output of their work. 3. Ensure you have clear values, mission and vision so it’s easy to spot what the great ideas are. → A great idea in Apple may not be a great idea in Amazon. Two companies, two very different values, that’s why it’s important that everyone in your company understands what the north star is, so they know what the metric for good idea is. 

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Interesting discussion with Dave Farley and Emily Bache. There are a lot of things that I agree with in it, however the one main sticking point that I have is that a true "engineer" in the more common incarnations, Mechanical, Civil, etc, require registration and licensing from a local state/district and/or governing body. I'd LOVE for programming to have such a system, but we currently don't. That's one reason why I settle with code craft and call myself a crafter. I agree it's not a perfect term, but to me its better than giving the false impression that there's a standard of skillset or understanding like other engineering disciplines. What do you think? https://lnkd.in/gXqmkden

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If anyone in my network is aware of some great discussion on the balance of BDD and TDD, I'd love to be pointed in that direction. Looking forward to learning more about the proper balance of such.

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My latest on Paragraph: Quickstarts Are Recipes - Developers Are Bakers My plea is that developers stop overcomplicating their quickstart guide when building software. Treat your quickstart like a recipe: - Start with a desired outcome, much like a baked good, and get that developer from 0 -> 1 - Set a 'prep time' and 'baking time' that are clear and won't take someone an entire afternoon - Make limited assumptions and make sure you list every single "ingredient" down to what version of a particular library might be a prerequisite or environment constraints - Finally, don't let your quickstart go stale - you want them to buy your cookbook after they follow your recipe. https://lnkd.in/eFDjGR7U

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Should be an interesting and insightful talk and discussion.

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Interesting paper about property based testing in real usage. Looks like as with any written tests it can help devs have clarity on their solution specs and helps document code. Harder to implement but more valuable when in place. https://lnkd.in/g_UEJvXW

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Trying to hire a junior to mid-level engineer in Scotland with great benefits and remote working is hard... https://lnkd.in/eQNHVqGR Not because the role isn't attractive (you'd be working on exciting large-scale system infrastructure challenges writing code with Golang - 1,000's of Kubernetes clusters, 10,000s of cloud VMs) or because the team are all crazy (they're thought leaders in their field including multiple upstream Kubernetes contributors from 3 continents!)... you got me... maybe there's a little crazy - but only the good kind! No... my challenge is whether this AI-generated image to go with my LinkedIn post makes any sense! I never have much luck with images containing generated text. Even using prompts like "spell check any text" or as is the case with this one "do not include any text" doesn't seem to work. Not to mention, I know what a Scottish Terrier is... but that "thing" in the bottom right looks more like an angry, tartan-wearing Capybara. Comment below for your biggest concerns with this image... or if you're a junior/mid-level, talented software engineer based in Scotland - maybe just skip over the image and apply online - https://lnkd.in/eQNHVqGR

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