Ramblings, rants and ruminations.
In our simulation of software development in a Kanban system, we can imagine three roles responsible for creating technical work for the development team: Product Owner - responsible for 'New Feature' work items, Customer Support - creates work items for live defects and other customer-reported stuff, Technical Debt - representing work originating inside the development team. Let's think about…
As a software developer, you typically and traditionally combine the roles of designer and implementer. You design a solution, in dialog with the problem, yourself and others, and in so doing, implement it in code. Until recently, it was rare to design some software and then hand over the implementation to someone else, at least at the level I typically work at - maybe you'd ask a junior developer…
In the last blog post in this series, we saw the taiichi application emitting a log message - a heartbeat - once a second. In this brief post, we'll take a bit of a diversion to set up the ECSx dashboard page in the web application. First, let's look at what you get when you run a phoenix application and open http://localhost:4000/ in your web browser: Nice, but it's just a landing page. Handily,…
Jira, Trello, that boards thing in Teams. Lots of people use some form of Kanban board for managing the flow of work for their team. Generally, they are pretty intuitive at first - 'to do', 'doing', 'done' is pretty self-evident. In Software teams, the subtleties of the work at hand means you often see additional columns and so much work in progress that it becomes hard to see what's actually…
The Remarkable Paper Pro is actually pretty good for reading and annotating text documents, certainly in PDF form. Here are some photos (crap quality) of Brendan Burns' Designing Distributed Systems 1 on my RMPP. I've deliberately (hah!) taken these pictures side-on so that you can see the full image on screen if you merely rotate your laptop 90 degrees. Designing Distributed Systems - front cover…
Spent some downtime organising My Files on my RMPP. I used numbers, tags and Folders to position my docs so as to be able to use the root 'My Files' as a Home Page. My goal is that I can just swipe down to get to the 99% of documents I use every day without needing to hunt around. I have three main themes for my work - Personal, Employer and Project/Client and my aim is to use these themes as the…
Let America Be America Again - Langston Hughes
Look for the bear necessities.
I'm managing a project that has graduate developers on the team. They are not yet very familiar with some of the background activities that contribute to a good delivery. This guide was knocked up to give them a starting point to think about what else they can do when they aren't coding on a user story. I’m focussing on tech stuff here and with an assumption that we’re doing Scrum or something…
Make your tests and demos look 10x better, with very little effort.