Peter Kananen

I envision a better alternative to Backstage: reusing an existing script and adding an intuitive interface. That's essentially what most people expect from a self-service portal for their software engineers — nothing more. #internaldeveloperportal #devex #developerexperience

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Testing software is quite a bit more than seeing if it can do something right. Testing is about trying "everything". Most importantly values that are on the edges and especially values outside valid ranges. https://xkcd.com/2928/

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Any tips on getting a @nextjs + @turborepo setup to run a bit faster? Cold boot takes ~20 seconds. HMR is about the same.

😀 Upcoming Complimentary Angular Coaching Session with SeaLadder: 📅 Angular Front-End Development Intro Session: Wednesday July 3rd at 8 PM AEST If you've already signed up for the Angular session, we look forward to seeing you then! Calendar invites and additional information has been sent out via email. Haven't signed up yet? Head over to our website or complete the Google Form below. My partner Adam Pond is going to be your rockstar coach - and if you know Adam you know his passion for learning is unmatched. The course is 4 weeks long, culminating with a project that you can proudly put on your CV 🚀 Why Join SeaLadder? 😎 SeaLadder is revolutionizing upskilling for software developers through a community-driven approach. As a member, you can: - Learn at your own pace or within a cohort - Become a mentor and share your expertise - Engage in diverse tech topics - Grow with a supportive community Special Beta Launch Benefits: - Free coaching sessions - One month free access - Discounted rates for the first three billed months Visit SeaLadder for more information and to secure your spot. 🌊 SeaLadder: Empowering Developers through Community and Learning 🌊 #angular #professionaldevelopment #frontenddevelopment #softwaredevelopment

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4 Things You Should Put in Your Daily Dev Log To harvest meaningful patterns from your dev log, you’ll need to capture the same things daily. I’ve been engineering software for 25 years, and I’ll share what I’ve routinely kept in mine. Your context is different, so your list will be also. Just make sure you capture the same things daily. Use this list as a skeleton to start from. It’s easier when you aren’t starting from a blank page! Pull Requests I keep track of every PR I submit, approve, or merge. Almost any work product I deliver or review flows through Git. My lists of PRs serve as a personal task-level kanban board of work in progress that I am connected to. These help me easily reconstruct a story of what I’ve done throughout the week. Personal Interactions I make note of every personal interaction I have, scheduled or otherwise. In addition to these notes, I keep a page for each person, and I link to that page from my daily notes. As I note patterns of interaction with a person, I’ll describe those patterns on their page. Over time I build a library of every person I’ve collaborated with and what we worked on together. Project Actions I keep a running narrative of the things I’m working on. I keep a section for each thing I’m working on. These might be at the product or story level - it just depends. Each time I hit a stopping point or interruption, I make a note of what I’ve been doing and what I plan to do next. Guess what I use to inform my daily standup updates? Perplexing Puzzles I make a note of everything that surprises me. These could be strange program behaviors, blockers, production issues - anything unexpected. As I review these periodically, I ask myself how I can use what I’ve learned to improve my mental models. Hopefully this list helps you get past the starting line. Do this faithfully for several months and see where it takes you!

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More detail on this: You should be considering the bottleneck cost of a Developer hour (annual revenue / dev hours) rather than your Developer's hourly wage when making strategic and tactical decisions. Say you make $700M in revenue, and have 500 Developers. Your blended Dev wage (acct for global teams) might be $40. But your COST of Developer time is $700. When you have processes that waste 10 minutes of Dev time, it's not costing you $6. It's costing you $116. This is how bottlenecks work.

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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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I’ve come to believe that agility is an outcome. My biggest software development related pet peeve is the assumption that agile is a framework or methodology. Even the folks who are quick to remind others that it is a mindset do so with the kind of language that assumes it’s a thing you do. When a debate arises about the challenges of adoption, inevitably the answer is “well, for <methodology/framework> to actually work, you need <the executives to buy in/to change budgeting/to do the framework better/to add more roles to manage the framework, etc.>…” What I rarely see, however, are arguments supporting the idea that you must first change how you build and deliver software. So let me save you some money. Before you hire someone to implement SAFe or Scrum or anything else, work with your developers to create the ability to get actual feedback from users in two weeks or less. You can thank me later.

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You won’t see me talking about testing trends, the latest and greatest in test tools and AI a lot on here, or in general. Not because I’m a curmudgeon that wants everything to stay as it was. Not because I’m scared of new technology and think it’s coming to take our jobs. Not because I don’t understand these things. Why then? Because I like to leave the ‘early adoption’ stage to others, learn from them and form an opinion through the experiences and thoughts of people I know and trust. Because contrary to what LinkedIn shows in your feed, a large portion of teams and organisations will not adopt these trends in the foreseeable future, if it all. Because many people in these teams need help with the fundamentals, and because many problems in our space are rooted in a misunderstanding of or knowledge gap around the fundamentals. Because despite clickbait terms such as ‘revolutionary’ and ‘game changer’, most of these new tools and technologies are far from that if you look at them a little closer. I don’t ignore trends. That would be unwise. But I’ve stopped running after them a long time ago.

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We had a few product false starts in the early days of Caribou, aka "let's turn one of the most complex Big Four services into software" This was largely due to the unique knowledge transfer issue that exists when you can't understand a process by observation alone. It felt like going back to school to learn about Transfer Pricing and International Taxes. It was great, but we weren't building quickly enough. Abstracting Transfer Pricing workflows can't be done by competitive analysis or observation (nothing exists anyway). You need experts to communicate the current norms and approach. We brought our tax team in-house to make this easier Then, we weren't sure how to prioritise features. We thought working with a dedicated PM would help, but that just made the knowledge transfer problem bigger - even if the PM had TP experience. We found success by giving our tax team more control over prioritization. Breaking down the most technical features was another hurdle, as 0% of our product team are tax experts. We oscillated between "we don't need to become experts" and "we can't proceed until we all understand this." We fixed this by always having Figma open and creating fast prototypes as we went. This worked so well!! These tweaks not only affected how we build but also how we prefer to exchange knowledge as a team👇

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Your legacy system has a software architecture. You had no influence on it. But you are in control of your reaction to it. #SoftwareArchitecture #Legacy #ControlTheControllables #React

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Question for engineering leaders (managers, directors, VP's, etc): I'm curious about the current landscape of developer productivity analysis + management tools - things like LinearB and Jellyfish. Which tool, if any, are you using? Any opinions/pros/cons on the tool you're using (or the entire domain overall)?

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Here’s a quality we don’t talk about enough, my #technicalhiring manager friends: speaking truth to power. How do we hire for people who are comfortable having incredibly uncomfortable conversations? Whether it’s talking about the downsides of a decision or raising the alarms about a dangerous defect, you want technical truthtellers on the team. Here’s how to get them. #recruiting #talentacquisition #techjobs #technicalhiring #developers #hiring #jobs #boeing

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Ugh, I keep hearing this thing lately... that there aren't enough great testers out there compared to developers. It bugs me so much, I finally asked why. The answer? Basically, "They miss too many bugs! Devs seem to have a better vision for the product." That felt way off, but it also got me thinking: is there any truth to it, and if so, how do we fix it? Here's the thing: I think we all need to take a good look at ourselves (and I mean that in the nicest way!). How can we change this perception? Let's ask ourselves some tough questions: - Do I truly get what this product is all about? - Am I on the same page as the people who will use it? - Can I spot potential problems before they become disasters? - Am I stuck in a testing bubble, doing the same old thing? - Have I learned any new tricks lately, whether it's a cool tool, a different coding language, or a fresh way to design tests? - Do I work well with others on the team? - Am I always pushing myself to be better? If any of those answers are "No," then it's time to roll up our sleeves and turn those "no's" into "yesses!" Feeling stuck? We gotta find a way out of that rut. Let's take pride in being testers! #testing #Introspection #brijeshsays

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When you hire software developers - you hire co-inventors - folks that will be collaborating with you to create your business. If you treat them like cogs in a machine - just there to key in the code that your management team tells them to - you’re not changing this fact. You’re just adding layers of difficulty to the ways in which they collaborate with you. And you degrade them as people. So if you don’t do it for the success of your business - at least do it because you’re a decent human being that cares about people. Think of your software people as partners - not order takers. No matter how comfortable and common the latter is. Because, as we know - there’s no bigger destroyer of business then “comfortable and common”.

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I look at the various channels and it see them full of people asking how to make a piece of code work. Makes me wonder what has testing been narrowed down to. Not a single person asking a testing question. Either the testing community is too good and found solutions to all testing problems or they aren't good enough to think of any. Honestly, I am no longer surprised by the job description and the kind of interviews that are arranged which are often preceded by coding tests on Leetcode or HackerRank. Companies might as well hire developers for those kind of roles. There's no need to distort the roles of testers based on certain presumptions and biases. Let me get this straight, having coding knowledge does help testers do a better job but ONLY having coding knowledge doesn't make them a good tester. Having good testing skills is the prerequisite. Automation is a tool and should be used as such. I know a lot of companies would say we'd rather have developers who can test rather than testers who can develop. The first category is a rarity (yeah there are developers who can test and do test but I am yet to see one who can test as well as a tester). The second category is slowly diminishing due to the crazy demands of the market. Companies seriously need to introspect and look at what they really need. If they are serious about the quality of their products then they should focus on testing and hire people who can actually test and should stop polluting the testing profile using automation as their excuse. Think about it! #softwaretesting #coding #skills #brijeshsays

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🆘 Ever pick up a legacy project that has little to no testing in place? Here’s one of our favorite techniques to build a test suite from nothing. Dropping everything to write unit tests for a large code base is rarely feasible from a business perspective. It’s like picking up leaves in your yard one at a time… you need a leaf blower 💨 Smoke tests give you the maximum coverage with the minimum effort. Pick out the key views or API endpoints and test that they return a 200 status code. Got something that requires a login? Verify it returns a 302, 403, or similar. Are they perfect? Nope 👎 Are they better than nothing? Absolutely! 👍 Like the leaf blower, a smoke test will get you big wins fast. Once you have a few baseline smoke tests in place, you can develop with a little more confidence and start adding more surgical tests in areas that require it.

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Enterprise Design 101: Complex Software. What I find to be true in most enterprise apps is that in a lot of cases, 80% of what shows up on a screen doesn’t need to be there. It doesn’t mean it's entirely unnecessary, it just doesn’t need to be surfaced right now. The biggest challenge is: How do we make the information relevant and cut down on the noise and clutter factor? Use the 'Progressive Disclosure' technique. It's about what people need right now to take the very next step, and once they do that, what they need after that. You hide the complexity and progressively disclose it on demand while keeping your software clean and simple. Try it next time for your software and you'll see a big difference. More on http://30kstrategy.com #uxdesign #enterprise #designthinking #startups #software #venturecapital

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