Peter Bell

🏎️💨 Making of a Ridiculously Fast™ API client in R. Why my package is **~17x faster** than the community alternatives that call the **exact same API endpoints**. 👇🏽**design choices matter** ✨ https://lnkd.in/ggi_2XyQ

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I read this amazing blog post over the weekend from Zack Urlocker & thought there were some interesting parallels to empowering decision making on QA teams. My takeaway: Pushing decisions down to the people closest to the work is one of the most powerful ways to increase ownership, accountability, and speed of execution. As QA professionals, we are intimately familiar with the products and systems we test. We understand the requirements, user flows, edge cases, and potential risks better than anyone. By empowering QA teams to make more decisions around testing strategies, prioritization, risk assessment, and quality gates, organizations can unlock several key benefits: Increased Ownership and Accountability - when given autonomy to make decisions, QA teams take greater ownership over the quality of the products they deliver. This drives a sense of accountability and responsibility to ensure thorough testing and high standards. Empowered teams are motivated to proactively identify and mitigate issues. Leveraging Expertise - QA professionals have deep domain knowledge from their hands-on experience with the product. Empowering them to make decisions allows this expertise to be fully leveraged in determining effective testing approaches tailored to the specific product needs. Faster Execution - with the ability to make decisions autonomously, QA teams can streamline testing processes, adapt quickly to changes, and provide timely feedback. This accelerates identification and resolution of issues, enabling faster delivery of high-quality products. Fostering Innovation - when given the freedom to make decisions, QA teams are empowered to get creative and innovative with their testing methodologies. They can experiment with new tools and techniques to continuously improve quality processes. Of course, empowering QA teams requires a foundation of trust from leadership and an investment in training to build decision-making capabilities. But the potential benefits of increased quality, efficiency, and innovation make it well worth the effort. Pushing decisions down cultivates an environment of trust and accountability that unlocks incredible potential. Let's embrace this mindset and empower our QA teams to make more decisions - the quality of our products will be better for it. #QualityAssurance #QATeams #EmployeeEmpowerment #AutonomyAtWork #DecisionMaking

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Recently I was thinking a lot more of the UI design, and just realized I need to separate simple and neat, or in more plain words, separate how people use it and how people feels like when look at it or play with it. These are two different things that I used to be unable to distinguish but just follow my intuitive feelings ( I do need to go back to school for this). The eyes may have total opposite requirements than the hands. Eyes love beautiful and rich designs while hands need simple and convenient designs. So if a product has both, it could be a great product. The most conflicting example in the real world is the design of the buildings. I always hate the modern style design of buildings but at the same time appreciate how it benefits more average people. Now I understand that it is simple for both eyes and hands. The most famous social chatting application ICQ died partly because it is very simple and convenient to use while extremely lack of beautiful and rich designs for eyes. The MSN died partly because of the same reason. The OICQ almost died because of this too, but the founders found the beautiful and rich design from Korea and revived it to be the first super successful social chatting application. A lot of very convenient to use products died very quickly and creators had no idea why. A lot of very beautiful products had been struggling to acquire more users and artists had been blaming users just don’t understand art. I understand that on the other side, lots of products are profit driven and the modern design or modern art is only prosperous in America where is probably the only place that modern enterprise system works great while lots of other places still run family owned businesses for generations.

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Building in public (BIP) is the practice of sharing stories about how products or services were — and are — being developed, with the aim of inspiring and engaging with like-minded people. Companies and startups that deliberately choose to share the entire process of product, or company creation with the public. A central tenet of the #Web3 movement is transparency and, for many activities, the concept of #zerotrust. The main concept behind the zero trust security model is "never trust, always verify", which means that users and devices should not be trusted by default, even if they were previously verified. #Opensource promotes the moral and economic principles of sharing and transparency for the greater good. In this post Chris Zheng, offers us an immediate and worthy experience of #buildinpublic in practice. This also happens to be a chance to see software engineering innovation as it happens. My hope is that Chris will be driving an entirely new and valuable approach to how we design, build, maintain and develop entire classes of #software.

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A good read on building with LLMs https://applied-llms.org/

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Listening to this podcast right now about the "enshittification" of tech (their words, not mine!). It's a good listen to understand at a macro level what's happening. https://lnkd.in/eETbYdZQ

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Just uploaded a brand new video! This one accompanies my blog post on using preconcurrency to incrementally adopt strict concurrency in your projects. enjoy! https://lnkd.in/d2irAM9D

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🪂 Some of the worst projects we've parachuted into have been led by a-hole developers. 📣 They are opinionated, loud, and dominate meetings. They are critical of other people's code and are often afflicted with Not Invented Here (NIH) Syndrome. 🚜 They tend to bulldoze through major architecture decisions and the rest of the team follows along, mostly because they fear their wrath. ⬆️ They also tend to fail up. They spearhead the massive rewrite of "legacy" code and when the cracks start to appear, they jump to a new role at a new company, touting their successes in the previous role. 🤢 Some of the worst architectures I've encountered were created like this: 1. Insisting no JOINs can be used in the database and nothing can be imported between Django apps because they might separate each one into microservices in the future (YAGNI). The result was terrible database performance as a result of serializing all the data whenever it crossed an app boundary. It required a months long rewrite to resolve. 2. Everything must be a microservice and ORMs are evil. This resulted in services sprawling all over which were undocumented and unmaintained. Schema changes were made manually and inconsistently so performance issues would crop up because an index had been added in one environment, but not another. It took the business years before they could reel all these all back in. ☢️ These people are so toxic to an organization. They force out the good people and leave behind a team that is too scared to share ideas or consenting views. Leadership tends get blinded in their smokescreen, so they put up with the bad behavior. 🪓 If you're a leader with someone like this on your team, LET THEM GO. It may feel like the business can't survive without them, but you'll be so much better off without them.

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During my time at LoopQA, I've found that an effective model for leveraging automation involves a clear division of responsibilities between development and QA teams. I'll caveat this by saying, I generally advocate for developers to refactor the automation they break, but the reality is that most organizations aren't willing to invest their time into it. Hence, having a dedicated QA team for E2E tests often proves more practical. Here's a typical and highly functional workflow: Local Development: -Developers work on their local environments. -They run unit tests and integration tests to ensure their code is functioning as expected. Dev/Test Environment: -Code is merged into a shared Dev/Test environment. -Unit/Integration Tests: These tests must pass before any merge can occur. If they fail, the merge fails. -E2E Sanity Tests: These are also run, but they can fail for both valid and invalid reasons. Developers need to be adept at identifying actual bugs versus new legitimate failures. -Automation teams step in to refactor failing E2E tests to ensure stability. A common problem here is when dev teams opt not to refactor failing tests, leading to false negatives and potential issues down the line. Stage/Pre-Prod Environment: -After passing all tests, the code moves to the Stage/Pre-Prod environment. -Any merge to this environment is contingent on passing E2E tests along with unit and integration tests. Production Environment -Finally, the tested and validated code is merged into the Production environment. Key Insights: -This model ensures that unit/integration tests act as crucial gatekeepers, providing immediate feedback to developers. -E2E tests, maintained by the QA team, ensure overall system validation and highlight integration issues early. -Collaboration and clear division of responsibilities between dev and QA teams maximize the value of automation, leading to robust and reliable code delivery. #SoftwareDevelopment #QA #Testing #DevOps #SoftwareQuality #Automation #ContinuousIntegration #ContinuousDeployment

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There is a lot to chew on in this great article by Maggie Appleton (Maggie Appleton), called Barefoot Developers. About how large language models might enable new kinds of software, free of the demands of industrial scale, unicorn-ness, and venture capital. Software that might be made for, say, a dozen people. If you are involved in software, this is worth your time to read. https://lnkd.in/eZA_uVYf

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so what is your move gaes

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"Our documentation is great!" said no one ever. It is always interesting to talk to folks about this problem. It'ss a problem that can be hard to grasp, measure, and even harder to solve. That is; unless you think about it in a different way. A little bit of simplification, structure, and even some AI might do the trick. I also found a new AI tool, Unblocked, while at LambdaConf this week. I am excited to start experimenting with Unblocked and think it could be a game changer when it comes to managing documents across an organization. Check out my latest article where I talk about #knowledgemanagment. Dennis Pilarinos Daniel Horton

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Hey #DevRel and #Community peeps: while it's still uncertain if I'll be at #devrelcon, I would like to pass on a discount code that could hopefully make it easier for you to attend. It looks like a lot of really good content, with more practical and actionable content than I've seen in years, so hopefully you'll be able to attend! And maybe I'll see you there too! https://lnkd.in/gCakgrMb

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What do you think about AI in senior care? Personally, I think we have to be careful with it. When AI presents itself as human, it can be confusing for seniors who may not have strong digital literacy skills. In fact, if they think they're talking to a person and not an AI chatbot, it can be dangerous if they're having a medical emergency or issue. However, there are some helpful use cases. I think Kristen Fischer's exploration of AI here is really interesting. "Artificial intelligence may be a useful communication tool to help older adults with cancer communicate with their doctors and have more of a say in their treatment," she says. AI can provide more context or explanation about certain treatment plans and translate the patient’s needs to clinicians in situations where the patient doesn't feel understood or heard. AI will never replace professionals, but it could help patients and clinicians better understand each other. Feel free to share your thoughts on this—I'd love to know if you think AI would be an effective tool for these situations. #AI #SeniorCare #FutureOfHealthcare

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Our "Community Examples" page for {quarto-webr} has been refreshed with projects using the extension. Explore textbooks, course lectures, and more: https://lnkd.in/g89AZ_EH This list isn't exhaustive. If you're working on a project using {quarto-webr}, let us know, and we'll add it! #quarto #webr #rstats

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I'm starting to wonder if era of non-critical Code/Integrated SaaS is coming to an end for anything but small apps and exploratory features. This thought was triggered by a billboard that touts a SaaS service by showing how much code you can delete by outsourcing some very important things to their service. I have a visceral "No Thank You" reaction to that idea. Why would I cede control of a critical part of my own product that we were previously capable of managing to some other company? Particularly knowing that they will likely enter the inevitable enshittified era in the coming years? I'm normally all for removing code! Code almost always means complexity, and complexity is the killer. But, these days, where we know pretty well how things are going to go in the 1-3 year timeframe, why would you agree to give that other company's motivations a seat at your technical decision making meetings? Into your budget planning? Into your product roadmapping? Or to put it more directly: Why would I risk accelerating my own product's enshittification by including yours? These kind of services worked great when companies didn't have to make money - they could focus on great UX and burn cash. But nowadays if if my product is built with many services, and some of them start getting thirsty, what choice do I have but to expose my own customers to their thirst and eat the cost?

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