Curated Content February 2023
A few pieces of content I thought were worthwhile in the month of February.
Articles
Write code that's easy to delete, and easy to debug too
While not a directly actionable blog post, this was a great article in the spirit of how you ought to focus on writing code.
Internal Software as a Competitive Advantage
Byrne Hobart
An interesting article about the way companies can build internal tools for competitive advantage, that is something I think many companies neglect in a major way.
Choose Boring Technology
At almost 8 years old this one probably won't be new to many folks, but this one is a great reminder of the tradeoffs you make with picking shiny new technologies.
Some are very worthwhile and enable your startup to succeed, but some are going to slow you down.
Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies
Baldur Bjarnason
A great simple reminder of the fact that for software organizations, or really any knowledge work organizations, churn makes it harder for organization to survive long term.
Books
Empowered - Marty Cagan
A great read for those that are trying to build amazing organizations, about the interaction between Product, Design, and Engineering, and how all of them need to interact with customers in order to sucessfully build the business.
Conference Talks
None this month.
Podcasts
None this month.
Tweets
Two tweets this month, without comment.
Management is a technology no less than git is a technology, and I think the pandemic forced many companies (and people) to panic migrate to remote before they had developed the management technologies necessary to do it well. https://t.co/Xj2mWJKHqz
— Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) January 25, 2023
"I'm not blocked"
— "Agile Otter" Tim Ottinger (@tottinge) January 27, 2023
Okay, but you have 20 tickets sitting out there that are "done" (code complete) but haven't made it to release due to PRs, bugs, etc.
All your work is blocked and jammed up.
But not you. This is fine, right?