Tim Gemoll

Corporate IT has no place on the path to production. I see LOTS of portcos that hold onto shortcuts they took when they were small. Corp IT runs Jira, or email goes out through the corporate mail gateway. Call it technical debt if you like, and taking on technical debt makes sense when you're a startup. But when you've made it past that stage, it's time to pay it down. Corporate IT is incredibly valuable. I was the Director of IT before I decided to dedicate my career to production web operations. I knew my CDW rep very well. Corporate IT can handle: corporate email, Salesforce, Tableau, calendaring, Zoom, Dropbox, etc. Corporate IT cannot handle: production SMTP gateways, Jira, Confluence, GitLab, Launch Darkly, Datadog, Cloudbees, etc. I don't care in the slightest which actual vendors you use for these functions. I've seen corporate IT change SCMs to "save money" without any input from engineering and set the entire organization release schedules back by more than 8 months because it turns out that GitHub "runners" have security concerns. People have made changes to corporate email and suddenly customers no longer receive notifications, and no one in engineering knows why. Engineering (including Operations) is where the money is made in a software company, and they need to own the path to production. Think of it in terms of "chain of custody" considering the concern over supply chain attacks. In the chain of custody, we don't just let someone with completely different concerns handle evidence. Why would you? #devops #sre #engineering

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There is no doubt in this fact considering the better features we have experienced when using Playwright like async awaits, no promises, checks retry, better debug, single API, complement dev workflows, using websocket protocol for faster execution, browser context for isolated test execution, supports cross domain like in case of SSO redirection, parallel execution...

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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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"The only valid measurement of code quality is # of WTFs/minute" I can't remember if he's the origin, but I got that from Robert Martin's clean code. And honestly looking back on my career it is true. But it does not only apply to SWE, I think it applies to Engineering or better yet symmetry in general. You see, the problem with bad code or a bad design, is that based on what you know to be right (and hopefully you are indeed right) what you are seeing is asymmetrical. Examples: An API fails to implement the intuitive use case. Or Drastically changing the behavior of an SUT does not trigger a failing test. Or Someone writes code that only expects the happy path.... what if the remote item you are trying to interact with is unavailable? In all this, it is probably worth noting that Symmetrical doesn't necessarily mean "Correct", it just means it makes sense to you. So make sure you are indeed correct (probably by fact checking and having empirical data)

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Another thing I do is track my time, religiously. Every single bit of "work" time I spend is tracked by client (which is sometimes my own company), project, and task. This makes it easy for me to see what I was doing, when, who it was for, and how long it actually took. I can also generate reports to see how much time I spent on certain types of tasks, including mundane things like "Processing" (which includes email, Slack, etc.)

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XDEV is heading to the Kansas City Developer Conference 2024! 🇺🇸 Join our CEO Richard Fichtner as he speaks on "Java Reborn: Write Kindergarten-Code and get high-performance apps"! 28 years after its first release Java is reborn to adapt itself to a changed world. The evolution of Java is totally different than Richard imagined. Join him and discover how features like VirtualThreads allow us to write code like in Java 101 and get high-performance apps at the same time. Unlearn reactive programming and object-relational mapping to come back to the beautiful beginning of Java. Use standard data structures like List and Map to model your data. Find joy again in debugging and reading stacktraces. Get rid of the fear that you might block a Thread. You can use the techniques shown in this talk today, to improve developer productivity and make your project's code easy to write, understand, troubleshoot and maintain. For more information on the conference program and tickets visit http://www.kcdc.info! #KCDC2024 #Java #JavaReborn #Coding

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Don't wait too long to consider QA for your projects, playing catch up is never fun or financially practical. If you're looking to build your team or need to ramp up to finish a project, let us handle this for you. Fractional resource options available for tight budgets or needed versatility. #QualityAssurance #QA #ProjectManagement #ResourceManagement #FractionalResource #BudgetFriendly #Versatility

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Be sure to mark your calendars for this one! #kcdnug #dotnet #questanalytics

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There’s something for everyone in web development in here:

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Just one month until my talk at KCDC: "Testcontainers: The Secret Weapon of Modern Software Development". Come listen and learn some cool things about automated testing with Containers! https://kcdc.info #KCDC #Testcontainers #Docker

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Kyle does a great job to highlight the pains of translating a shared design system into shared styles between React web and React Native. I do like the use of types to enforce existing style primitives compared to hard coding numbers, but I understand that native mobile developers are not used to the compositional nature of the first design system, compared to shared styles via StyleSheet, NativeWind, or similar. Fusing mobile and web beyond the data layer becomes more and more tricky. react-native-web often isn't the answer. As "headless" components grow to help fuse HTML vs React Native components, we still have a need for sensible styling.

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It's easy for your customers to get overwhelmed. Between complex offerings, multiple vendors, and their regular day jobs, it's a lot. Ron Whitson knows how to break through the commotion and give customers a clear view of your solution. Read this blog for more! https://lnkd.in/gY6Etf6z #buyerenablement #consensus #demoautomation #presales #scalingpresales

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Developer downtime: don’t overwork your devs. It’s memorial weekend and I’m lazily sitting on my porch. My kids keep coming in and out of the house, but get stuck because the sliding door keeps coming off the rails and won’t open. Well, since I’ve got nothing else scheduled for the afternoon I investigate the issue. Turns out sliding doors have a bunch of adjustment screws. I adjust them till the door slides smooth. Left in the broken state my kids learned to hit top left side of the door before opening it. Bringing this back to work, I know customer success teams that have a cheat sheet of these maneuvers. Give devs space to observe, we naturally fix these issues.

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Getting new tools is fun - hand tools, power tools, software tools. Problem is, sometimes, maybe often, we don’t invest the time to learn how to use tools properly. We want instant results, or we get bored quickly and buy more tools with the promise of just what we need. Fact is, if we take the time to learn what the tools can do for us, there’s a lot of value to be realized from them. I’m currently restoring a dining room set, and bought a 1/8” chisel and an upholstery staple remover for very little cost, but after spending some time learning how to use them, they’ve made a huge impact. I find the same is true with software. Often a simple, maybe even free open-source library is all one needs. Just take the time to learn what it can do, then put it to good use. Don’t chase the next silver bullet.

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One of the teams I manage came up with some code review principles in a workshop I ran recently. How do your teams think about code review? What's worked well or caused issues in the past? Every team is unique so I'm curious how others have approached this 😃 --- Authors should: - stop starting, start finishing - keep PRs small - provide evidence - move the PR forward Reviewers should: - provide an outcome within 24 hours - debate productively (https://lnkd.in/exVeR-cy) - clearly indicate nits - don't be afraid to jump on a call https://lnkd.in/eEdfRuU2 #codeReview

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The last day to register for Nebraska.Code() without a Late Fee is July 3rd! https://lnkd.in/dsKrsic #SoftwareDesign #development #deployment #AI #machinelearning #frontenddevelopment #opensource #technology #EmergingTrends #practicalagile #DevOps #SecurityMeasures #careerdevelopment #softwarecraftsmanship #Nebraska #TechnologyConference

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