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QCon Plus (Nov 29): Level-Up on the Engineering Trends You Might Need To Embrace
At the QCon Plus online software development conference this November 29 to December 9, over 1,500 senior software engineers, architects, and team leads will learn about important trends our Program Committee believes will have the most impact on software development.
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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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Obituary: Alex Blewitt
It is with great sadness that we announce that InfoQ editor Dr. Alex Blewitt has unexpectedly passed away.
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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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Dropbox Unplugs Data Center to Test Resilience
Dropbox has published a detailed account of why and how they unplugged an entire data center to test their disaster readiness. The disaster readiness team began building tools to make performing frequent failovers possible, and ran their first formalized failover in 2019. Eventually, with new tooling and procedures, the data center was unplugged. This provided a significantly reduced RTO.
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Applying Observability to Increase Delivery Speed and Flow in Teams
When we design team and departmental processes, we want to know what’s happening in the software teams. Asking team members to provide information or fill in fields in tools adds a burden and distorts reality. Setting up observability in the software can provide alternative insights in a less intrusive way. Observability in the software can be an asset to organizing teams.
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GitHub Copilot Adopts Paid Model, Still Free for Some Open-Source Maintainers and Students
After almost one year in technical preview, GitHub Copilot is now prime time-ready for students and individual developers, says GitHub, while companies and larger organizations could get access to it before the end of the year.
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Every Truth Can Be Established Where It Applies: an Impossible Thing for Developers
Developers can face impossible things in their daily work. Not all preconditions can be checked in code due to the definitional constraints of the programming language. 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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Office Design for Hybrid Workplaces
With the shift from remote to hybrid work, organisations are rethinking office design with an understanding that what worked (or didn't work) in the pre-pandemic world does not work today. Office space needs to be redesigned to accommodate different ways of working and collaborating.
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How to Become a Staff-Plus Engineer
If you are interested in becoming a staff-plus engineer, take time to explore your values and start discussing your career goals and ambitions with your manager. You can engage with engineering communities to develop your skills. Staff-plus engineers are able to lead tech people, where getting things done goes beyond their individual capacity to grow and mentor others.
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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.