Viewing profile — mobjack

It is understanding that leadership doesn't care about the technical details. Devs are expected to figure out these details on their own. Instead try to understand what others real…

I am a big fan of the Agile Manifesto, but Agile has evolved to be something completely different. It became a rigid process where people debate the definition of story points rath…

A production replica if you want to be safe

You ask someone in slack. If that isn't sufficient, set up a small 1 on 1 meeting to discuss. You can't avoid all meetings, but you can keep them few and small.

Because the senior dev always says no.

At my startup, every new management hire thinks they can improve our process by introducing scrum. Every year we make another attempt at it only to find out that it isn't agile eno…

Computer science is one of the harder subjects to assess knowledge through tests. In other industries, passing an accreditation exam gives you value in the market. In software engi…

There comes a point where impossible to leave code in a better state without a major refactor. The choice is between writing a few ugly if statements making the code a little worse…

The argument is if you specialize in young women's clothing, instead of trying to micro target messaging to different personas, have a single message that can work with everyone yo…

I often use the 80/20 rule to push back against requirements from product managers. Identify the features that are hard to implement and provide little business value then cut them…

That is short term cynical thinking. Being able to give honest and constructive feedback is a skill that will grow your career more in the long run. An exit interview is one of the…

How do they define fast fashion? What makes it different than a budget T-shirt that you wear multiple times? Fast fashion is more about how clothes are marketed than the inherent p…

They are the wrong layer of abstraction outside of simple CRUD apps. If you have to check the API docs anyways, I rather define custom domain specific verbs than debate whether som…

I find testing everything through public methods can lead to excessive mocking, which ties you even more to the implementation.

I recently bought a toaster for the first time as an adult and started eating a lot more bread as a result. Other toasting methods work, but they could take longer to set up and yo…

A lot of my planning is making sure the most effective engineers are working on the most important things. It is about making sure resources are most efficiently allocated to meet …

I know everyone learns differently, but I gained most of my programming skills just from programming. You will study other people's code on the job and code reviews provide coachin…

I've A/B tested hiding functionality and reducing info density increased the number of people spending money on the site. I was completely shocked by seeing those results initially…

What is the definition of done?

My issue is that much of Agile in practice ignores the first value and puts process over people. This is especially true with Scrum.

A lot of playing politics is just knowing the type of extra work that will get you promoted.

I read about spring's best practices and think some are unnecessary boilerplate code without any real benefits. I get the theory, but in practice, the benefits are just theoretical…

I prefer documentation with sparse text and lots of diagrams and images. It provides the high level context and I can fill in any gaps with a short follow up conversation. For most…

I often see engineers having a cynical self defeating view of the business. They will blindly follow complex requirements while complaining that there is not much they can do about…

It is a measurement problem. Android users are more likely to use Gmail which proxies the images so you can't tell what device it was opened on.