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  • Getting More Work Done in Fewer Working Hours

    When Jason Lengstorf’s body was actively falling apart due of the way he was working, he decided to limit his computer usage and create pockets of high-focus effort. Working fewer hours prevents you from becoming overtired or unfocused. We need to treat downtime with the same level of care as we treat our uptime, using breaks to make creative connections, recharge, and to remember why we work.

  • Tackling Technical Debt at Meetup

    Continuous product health can be realized by regularly prioritizing the highest impact technical debt items and knocking those off systemically. You need to continuously iterate how you're tackling technical debt to drive more and more impactful results. Going for maximum impact items first and communicating the impact of paying down technical debt is what Yvette Pasqua, CTO of Meetup, recommends.

  • Better Engineering via Better Discourse

    Killing opposition with kindness is a real strategy in online discussions; there is power to disarm in acting as if the other party did not intend to be insulting or condescending. Accept that there will be bias in online communication, use facts and reason to deal with it, and practice awareness of bias and attempt to compensate.

  • Bridging the Gap between Legacy Systems and Modern Techniques

    Aging platforms that are managed with manual, time consuming processes can be costly. Teams can make a business case to management based on hours lost by repetitive work or re-work caused by human error for introducing modern techniques like automation tools and containers. The result is a predictable and repeatable process with minimal human interaction to deploy more often and more confidently.

  • Fearless Feedback for Software Teams

    Feedback builds trust, increases team cohesion, and helps individuals to improve their skills and grow in their craft. An effective feedback cycle is the best possible tool for improving team performance. With feedback, issues are addressed before they become toxic and mistakes can be course-corrected early on.

  • The Economics of Microservices: Phil Calçado Recommends Avoiding ‘Microliths’ at CraftConf

    At CraftConf 2017 Phil Calçado presented “The Economics of Microservices”. The key takeaway from the talk: the ‘Inverse Conway Maneuver’ can be a useful tool to shape an application’s architecture during a migration away from a monolith, but this can lead to creating ‘microliths’ unless the ‘transaction cost’ of creating a new service is lowered to below the cost of adding to an existing monolith.

  • Automated Acceptance Testing Supports Continuous Delivery

    Automated acceptance tests are an essential component of a continuous delivery style testing strategy, as they give an important and different insight into the behaviour of our systems. Developers must own the responsibility to keep acceptance tests running and passing, argued Dave Farley; you don't want to have a separate QA team lagging behind a development team.

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