12 posts · 6 companies · newest first
We recently sped up our integration tests by a factor of ten by running many of them in parallel. There were several flaky tests in the new test suite. Claude was really useful in getting rid of almost all flakyness, … Continue reading →
Author: Diana CibuPublic orators have played a major role in spreading knowledge and driving progress since the early days of oratory in Ancient Greece. I’ve always been fascinated by speakers’ unique ability to catch an entire audience’s attention and how they turn messages into valuable takeaways that stick with you long after their speech is done.If there’s one thing I’ve learned throughout my journey as a tech speaker is that knowledge doesn’t just depend on the message you want to deliver; Knowledge happens when you get people to hear it. This is even more true in today’s world. Current…
One of the major shifts in developer ergonomics has been the introduction of functional pipelines to most popular languages. A pipeline is a chain of operations on a set of data that transforms the data into another shape or value. It is made functional by using lambda functions as the primary way of specifying behavior. git ls-files | grep -o "\.\w*$" | sort | uniq -c Linux has always been built around this idea; programs accept text input and produce text output. This allows you to chain programs together with pipes (|). The above example finds all tracked files in a git repo, then matches…
How insights from cognitive science and social psychology explain why software knowledge is so hard to preserve Summary Software teams face a knowledge problem that no amount of documentation seems to solve. When experienced developers leave, something valuable departs with them — something that comprehensive handover documents and well-commented code fail to capture. Two researchers from the 1980s provided frameworks that, when combined, explain this phenomenon with unusual clarity. Peter Naur argued that programming is fundamentally theory-building1: the real product of software development…
Our Work Organization Framework JourneyPhoto by Daniel Watson @pexelsWhat Makes Cross-functional Collaboration Actually Work?In today’s cross-functional environments, the most impactful initiatives rarely live within the boundaries of a single team or person. Whether we’re building new product features, improving infrastructure, or tackling technical debt, success depends on seamless collaboration across multiple teams and roles, including engineering, product, design, analytics, and beyond.Think about when you’re making a big dinner for friends. You might be the main cook, but you need…
Since 2002, I have been keeping track of all the tricky bugs I have come across. Nine years ago, I wrote a blog post with the lessons learned from the bugs up till then. Now I have reviewed all the … Continue reading →
Just as the universe is governed by a handful of fundamental forces, (gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces), software engineering is too shaped by irreducible forces. These forces, drawn from the deep structure of our discipline, define what is possible, what is difficult, and why certain patterns of success and failure recur. Viewing software engineering through this lens allows us to see not just a collection of best practices, but a coherent framework grounded in the very nature of software itself. Synthesis: A Standard Model of Software Engineering These three…
This week I attended the Jfokus software development conference in Stockholm, Sweden. I first went in 2011, and I have been back many times through the years. The conference has a Java focus (duh!), but many talks cover general topics … Continue reading →
Before I read The Man from the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya, I only knew about John von Neumann in two contexts: that computers use the von Neumann architecture, and that he appeared in a story about a mathematical problem I … Continue reading →
Do queues in the ladies’ toilets signify success at an IT conference? Is a half-hour sit-down worth more than a T shirt? These and other deep questions pondered. Capgemini’s Cloud Development team are returning from our annual pilgrimage to Devoxx UK, the best and biggest annual IT developer conference in the UK. As is becoming usual, a train strike limited my attendance on the Wednesday, but even in a couple of days there has been much to inspire and mull over. This year, instead of a full booth, Capgemini sponsored a corner filled with super-comfy bean bags, and it was the most popular our…
I recently celebrated my one year anniversary as a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) trainee at SoundCloud. Looking back, I had very little…
Exercism.io is a fantastic site and tool that provides a wealth of daily code exercises. If you want to learn to be better in a language, it's a great resource to do exercises and receive feedback. Origin Exercism.io was introduced to me by Franklin Webber of gSchool and JumpStart Labs fame. He and his colleagues use it as a part of their instruction, and it's a great, free tool available to the public. Languages There is a fun array of language-learning possibilities inside Exercism. It currently includes a varying number of exercises across these languages: clojure elixir haskell javascript…