Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Maximizing Developer Effectiveness

martinfowler.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 168 posts

Re: Maximizing Developer Effectiveness

#61

Post by postit »

lxe wrote: post #51

Here I am, a productive developer eager to deliver maximum value to my customers and apply my innovation to company goals. Open up JIRA and pick up a unit of work to produce today -- gotta stay faithful to those story points! Somehow, a magic team of spherical devops in a vacuum created an environment where things are just green, predictable, and are never broken. Another theoretical team of angels from a parallel un…

Thanks.

This summarizes and completes perfectly the ThoughWorker bingo. They are always dreaming about the ultimate factory line for knowledge workers, but they don’t get much done other than blog posts.

Re: Maximizing Developer Effectiveness

#62

Post by cjfd »

dvt wrote: post #9

> There is an overwhelming amount of good advice, practices, tools, and processes that you should use to improve. I disagree. Advice is contradictory, practices and processes are often orthogonal, and tools quite literally don't exist. I say this as someone that's worked in large companies and saw how lengthy not only process feedback loops were (especially developer ↔ product team), but also engineering feedback loo…

I think the biggest factor is in this is that so many different tools are being used. Often tools are brought in to make something easier or solve some problem but nobody seems to be thinking about the huge cost that this entails in terms of keeping all of these moving parts working. I think staying with older and more solid stuff that is not in a rapid flux of so-called improvement is often a much more pleasant experience. I think the barrier for introducing some new kind of tooling should be much higher than it often is in practice.

Re: Maximizing Developer Effectiveness

#63

Post by maxwelljoslyn »

lxe wrote: post #51

Here I am, a productive developer eager to deliver maximum value to my customers and apply my innovation to company goals. Open up JIRA and pick up a unit of work to produce today -- gotta stay faithful to those story points! Somehow, a magic team of spherical devops in a vacuum created an environment where things are just green, predictable, and are never broken. Another theoretical team of angels from a parallel un…

> It gives me a thumbs up and discards its human shell to fade back into the ones and zeros.

Me saying goodbye to the bus driver before walking into the office.

Thanks for writing, 'lxe.

Re: Maximizing Developer Effectiveness

#64

Post by 14u2c »

lxe wrote: post #51

Here I am, a productive developer eager to deliver maximum value to my customers and apply my innovation to company goals. Open up JIRA and pick up a unit of work to produce today -- gotta stay faithful to those story points! Somehow, a magic team of spherical devops in a vacuum created an environment where things are just green, predictable, and are never broken. Another theoretical team of angels from a parallel un…

Absolutely. Here's the thing though, in this hellscape you might as well take advantage, and if these units of work can be generated like so, then its quite easy to become a "top performer" by adjusting your commit habits.

Re: Maximizing Developer Effectiveness

#65

Post by onethought »

postit wrote: post #61
lxe wrote: post #51

Here I am, a productive developer eager to deliver maximum value to my customers and apply my innovation to company goals. Open up JIRA and pick up a unit of work to produce today -- gotta stay faithful to those story points! Somehow, a magic team of spherical devops in a vacuum created an environment where things are just green, predictable, and are never broken. Another theoretical team of angels from a parallel un…

Thanks. This summarizes and completes perfectly the ThoughWorker bingo. They are always dreaming about the ultimate factory line for knowledge workers, but they don’t get much done other than blog posts.

Even by the HNs/SV measure of success they just got 700 million in funding and a 4.6 billion valuation... Just from writing blog posts apparently.

Re: Maximizing Developer Effectiveness

#66

Post by lxe »

14u2c wrote: post #64
lxe wrote: post #51

Here I am, a productive developer eager to deliver maximum value to my customers and apply my innovation to company goals. Open up JIRA and pick up a unit of work to produce today -- gotta stay faithful to those story points! Somehow, a magic team of spherical devops in a vacuum created an environment where things are just green, predictable, and are never broken. Another theoretical team of angels from a parallel un…

Absolutely. Here's the thing though, in this hellscape you might as well take advantage, and if these units of work can be generated like so, then its quite easy to become a "top performer" by adjusting your commit habits.

I keep my github squares a deep shade of green.

Re: Maximizing Developer Effectiveness

#67

Post by onethought »

bradlys wrote: post #15
GiorgioG wrote: post #10

> I often help engineering organizations that are in the midst of a transformation. This is typically both a technology transformation and a cultural transformation. For example, these organizations might be attempting to break a core monolithic system into microservices, so that they can have independent teams and adopt a DevOps approach. It's amazing this fad of microservices still hasn't subsided yet. It is the ba…

They're doing microservices because they can't make a good monolithic codebase. For some reason, CTOs are very happy to start doing microservices with high level of documentation and rigorous interfaces but completely unwilling to have a well documented and rigorously defined monolith. I don't fucking get it. It's like one layer of abstraction on top of folders. Instead of breaking up ownership by folders or whatever…

Microservices and monorepos are unrelated to each other.

You can have 100 micro services from a single repo, and the services are just different folders.

Microservices help people have bounded context when they are develop and they leak their abstractions less into the next one. Monoliths (admittedly I've only seen them in Python, Ruby and .Net) start reaching into each others pieces and adding to tech debt in subtle ways.

You are of course right, discipline is required in both architectures, but there are different emphasis in both.

Re: Maximizing Developer Effectiveness

#68

Post by xyzelement »

Aeolun wrote: post #55
xyzelement wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I sometimes wonder who these articles are written for. If you're a Leader (big L) in an org, this gives you a way to asses your organization. If you're a leader (small l) it may give you a way to concretize your thinking around problems so you can discuss them better. >> Am I supposed to share this with the CTO to show them how poorly the organization is being run? That would be the worst way? Why don't you pick w…

I find this hard to justify to myself. It’s literally my boss’s job to fix these impediments (and the boss’s boss, and their boss). Am I supposed to teach them how to do their jobs? In addition to doing my own?

If you are a senior member of the team and problems are apparent to you, I would expect you to productivity call them out.

It sounds like you want to gripe about the problems on HN but not actually try to solve?

Re: Maximizing Developer Effectiveness

#69

Post by pantelisk »

torbital wrote: post #57
dvt wrote: post #9

> There is an overwhelming amount of good advice, practices, tools, and processes that you should use to improve. I disagree. Advice is contradictory, practices and processes are often orthogonal, and tools quite literally don't exist. I say this as someone that's worked in large companies and saw how lengthy not only process feedback loops were (especially developer ↔ product team), but also engineering feedback loo…

> I want environments to just work. I want code to just compile. I want containers to just run. Without me having to start digging through documentation, looking at thirteen Stack Overflow threads, and cobbling a solution that will inevitably break 3 months from now. Sometimes I conjure up the inspiration to actually implement an idea that's been on my mind. Then I spend half a day trying to setup an environment that…

If you don't mind me asking. What stack are you working with? And how do you approach things?

My experience has been very different (was able to validate ideas and mvps extremely fast, sometimes even in a day/night - but I am very product driven which I think makes the whole difference (meaning that I care to see if the idea works from an end-user perspective first, the rest comes after and only after the project has grown for a while))

Re: Maximizing Developer Effectiveness

#70

Post by onethought »

Aeolun wrote: post #55
xyzelement wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I sometimes wonder who these articles are written for. If you're a Leader (big L) in an org, this gives you a way to asses your organization. If you're a leader (small l) it may give you a way to concretize your thinking around problems so you can discuss them better. >> Am I supposed to share this with the CTO to show them how poorly the organization is being run? That would be the worst way? Why don't you pick w…

I find this hard to justify to myself. It’s literally my boss’s job to fix these impediments (and the boss’s boss, and their boss). Am I supposed to teach them how to do their jobs? In addition to doing my own?

While I get the employee/employer/manager relationship can be a bit shit a lot of the time.

This attitude is likely contributing to whatever problems you are encountering, and they are potentially trying to fix.

Post reply on HN