Curated Content March 2022
A few pieces of content I thought were worthwhile in the month of March.
Articles
Handoffs & Queues
Jeff Kosciejew
Shared by a member of my team talking about some of the pain they were feeling around waiting for code reviews, and batching them into heads down time and office hours. This one helped them reflect on some of the other ways we could tackle the problem and what the implications of their decision would be for the team and the flow of work in the organization.
Always worth considering queues and the damage they do to the delivery of value and morale in an organization.
Books
Mob Programming - Woody Zuill and Kevin Meadows
While I can't say that this book will immediately make you drop everything and tell your teams we're an all mob programming all the time shop, I think that Zuill and Meadows make some compelling arguments for adding mob programming as a tool in your belt.
In the brief experiments I've been doing with this with my team, and in my personal time, I can say that it can be extremely effective in quickly getting a team up to speed on a project, and flowing because the solutions and code are all immediately socialized.
Conference Talks
This month I went to The Big Elixir in New Orleans and saw Sophie DeBenedetto and Ignacio Aguirrezabal give some incredible talks on Phoenix's LiveView.
Sophie showcased how she believes that Phoenix's LiveView is ready for prime-time, having overcome several major obstacles, and presenting a great developer experience.
Ignacio showcased how Phoenix's sockets and channels could be composed to make LiveView work, in what was probably the most polished live coding conference talk that I've seen to date.
However, the talks aren't posted yet, so I'll be including links to those when they come up.
How to Stop Hating Your Tests
In the interim we've got How to Stop Hating Your Tests by Justin Searls, which I found useful for helping to explain and understand common pain points in a test suite, and how to avoid them, maximizing the value of your test suite.
Podcasts
Rather than a list of recommended podcasts, this month I'm publicly noting that I'm fed up with the poor user experience that is the Apple Podcasts app, and need recommendations. Long ago I used Stitcher, but am not sure if there are currently better apps for it. Currently considering Audible because it already houses many, but not all of my audiobooks.
Tweets
Here’s the hardest thing for talented engineers to grok:
— Swizec Teller published ServerlessHandbook.dev (@Swizec) March 26, 2022
If you can do it in 2 hours and a team mate can do it in 4, your job is to get the team mate down to 2.5
Over a quarter, that’s faster than you doing all the work.
A simple thread, but one that can be really hard for some of the talented folks on your team.