Curated Content June 2021
A few pieces of content I thought were worthwhile in the month of June.
Articles
The Rails Doctrine
Whatever you may think of DHH, the Rails Doctrine still resonates with me very strongly. Other software communities, and the teams and companies operating in them, could have long lasting success by applying these principles.
Manual Work is a Bug
TLDR: Figure out how to turn things into checklists, and then automate those checklists. Your life will get dramatically better for it.
Especially important for tech/IT teams, but important guiding philosophy for businesses generally.
How to Spread Technical Practices Like TDD in an Organization
Emily Bache
An excellent article with concrete actions you can take to more effectively teach technical practices to level up your organization.
Books
Writing Without Bullshit
Thi will be required reading for folks on my team going forward. It teaches you how to write clearly and concisely to deliver value to your readers.
Conference Talks
Functional architecture - The pits of success
Keeping your architecture cleaner and more hexagonal is less complex if you use more functional rather than object oriented design. Not that it's not possible, but you need more code to do it, and it's generally more complicated code. Write more functional code most of the time, even in object oriented languages.
Tweets
The most common question I see about refactoring is some variant of “how do I convince management to let me do refactoring?” The answer is. You don’t. Refactoring is a constant activity integrated into the cost of a story. As you write code to implement the story, refactor.
— Michael Brown (@browniepoints) June 23, 2021
Refactoring is a cost of doing things properly in software. Don't ask for permission to do your job properly.
Many of the big tech companies are forcing staff to go back to the office. I think this is shortsighted; you should make the company beg you to go back to working remote. A thread of advice from some of the worst colleagues I ever had:
— Corey Quinn (@QuinnyPig) June 29, 2021
I can't say this tweet was particularly insightful, but was great for a laugh as offices reopen.