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A Distributed System is Knowable: an Impossible Thing for Developers
Failure in distributed systems is normal. Distributed systems can provide only two of the three guarantees in consistency, availability, and partition tolerance. According to Kevlin Henney, this limits how much you can know about how a distributed system will behave. He gave a keynote about Six Impossible Things at QCon London 2022 and at QCon Plus May 10-20, 2022.
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Dealing with Cognitive Load Using Observability
We can make good decisions with speed when we limit the cognitive load on any one person or team. Observability can help to increase delivery speed, by providing information to developers that helps them to make decisions quickly.
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Getting Feedback When Your Colleagues Are Also Your Customers
Getting and using feedback from colleagues who are also customers using your product can improve the quality of the product and help to improve the way of working. In this situation, it’s easier to receive feedback, but you can get overloaded by it.
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Developing and Evolving SaaS Infrastructures for Enterprises
SaaS companies that are focused on the enterprise market need to evolve their infrastructure to meet the security, reliability, and other IT requirements of their customers. IT admins and large customers are two important sources of requirements to drive development.
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Promoting Empathy and Inclusion in Technical Writing
Empathy is the first step in practicing sustainable, genuine inclusion. If persons or groups of people feel unwelcome because of the language being used in a community, its products, or documentation, then the words can be changed. Identifying divisive language can help to make changes to the words that we use.
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The Future is Knowable before it Happens: an Impossible Thing for Developers
In software development there are always things that we don’t know. We can take time to explore knowable unknowns, to learn them and get up to speed with them. To deal with unknowable unknowns, a solution is to be more experimental and hypothesis-driven in our development. Kevlin Henney gave a keynote about Six Impossible Things at QCon London 2022 and at QCon Plus May 10-20, 2022.
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The Journey of Going Back to Testing after Being a Testing Manager
Returning to testing after having become a test manager can be challenging. For Julia María Durán Muñoz it meant finding a company that appreciated her experience and recognized her desire and ability to do technical work. It can help to get training to update your knowledge, refresh your technical skills, and practice your skills before starting interviews.
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Trust-Driven Development: Accelerate Delivery and Increase Creativity
By building trust you can break silos, foster collaboration, increase focus, and enable people to come up with creative solutions for products and for improving their processes. The DevOps movement was created to break the silos in the organisations; trust can be built by organising pair programming across various functions and various teams.
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Transitioning to Modern Testing: How Testers Can Stop Being the Training Wheels for Teams
Traditional testing, where testers act as safety nets and testing is separated from implementation, can have a detrimental impact on quality. Testers can instead act as coaches, collaborate in teams, and foster change, to stop becoming the training wheels for teams. Culture is key, particularly in that the environment provides psychological safety.
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Words Matter in Documentation to Build Better User Experience
The language that we use in our products or documentation can make people feel unwelcome or hurt people. We can choose words that are precise, not dependent on complex metaphors, and convey messages without negative connotations.
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How Getting Feedback from Angry Users Helps to Develop Better Products
Every time you change something in your product, angry users can show up. These users are engaged and they care about your product. Listening to them can help you find golden nuggets of user insight to improve your product.
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Trust-Driven Development: Building Cognitive and Emotional Pillars
Trust-driven development uses authenticity to build a safe environment for people to operate. To build trust we need to focus on two main pillars of trust – cognitive and emotional. We need to be brave, have courage, and give people access to our authentic selves.
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Learnings from Discussing Developer Enablement at QCon London
Developer enablement can increase the potential of individuals in small and larger companies. Where individuals can have their own solutions, there will be things that are mandatory for all. Metrics can help to see what is being used or not. Be careful about supporting developer enablement for legacy systems; if it’s outdated and needs to be replaced then it might be better to not invest in it.
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Every Question Has an Answer: an Impossible Thing for Developers
We tend to assume that every question has an answer, which for instance isn’t true when we want to find out what the current time is. Developers should increase awareness of unexpected failure modes, advertise the possibility of failure, and use time-outs to recover from waiting for an answer that will never come.
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How Developer Enablement Brings Benefits to Software Organizations
Developer enablement is about tools and approaches that can greatly increase the potential we can have as individuals. It can have an impact on productivity and happiness, on profits and retention. Developer tools make it easier for engineers to deploy products, enabling them to focus on building a product.