2024
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It's Okay to be a Bit Techy in Your Gherkin
Gherkin tests are meant to be an abstraction over the code of automated tests to facilitate collaboration by all stakeholders, but that shouldn't mean that we banish any technical whiffs from them.
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Book Club 12/2024: Team Metrics and KPIs
Allow neither ignorange nor complacency to abuse metrics or KPIs; these are important tools for the competent professional.
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Pull Requests are Just Fine, Thanks
If you search around, there's a lot of anti-PR sentiment to be found on software engineering blogs, but if you follow onto forums it doesn't seem to be a popular sentiment. Most of these criticisms are misdirected; in fact, pull requests are just fine.
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Book Club 11/2024: No
On forming quality opinions and saying 'no'
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Three Laws
Some 'folk laws' that are commonly known but seldom applied.
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Guerrila DevEx Testing
Developer experience is subjective. Employ the 'hallway test' method to ascertain your code's quality.
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There Are Infinite Administrators
Yes, infinite, and they're inventing more each day! The larger the system, the greater the problem that nobody really knows how it all works.
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Don't Retro the Same Twice
Different retrospective formats are mostly the same thing in different flavors - don't argue about them; try all the flavors (at least once)
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The Case for Single-Reviewer PRs
Or, strengthening your team and its code with communication, professionalism, and trust.
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Scrum is not Agile
Taking a step back to try to be a bit more rigorous about these process terms we use.
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Book Club 3/2024: Simplicity
Everything is too complicated.
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On Task Priority
Some thoughts on assigning priority to our tasks.
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The Network is Unreliable and Reliability is Scary
Indeed the network is unreliable, and this is especially concerning for modern, distributed system. The catch though is that it never can be 100% reliable, and we can't create systems that perfectly compensate for this.
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Develop Effective Coding Standards
Bad coding standards are worse than no standards, and even good standards are sometimes unnecessary. What's the utility in coding standards, and what makes a good one?
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Eight Maxims
A few principles for thoughtful software engineering.