"modern software development" entries

Four short links: 29 May 2015

Four short links: 29 May 2015

Data Integration, Carousel, Distributed Project Management, and Costs of Premature Build

  1. Using Logs to Build Solid Data Infrastructure — (Martin Kleppmann) — For lack of a better term, I’m going to call this the problem of ‘data integration.’ With that, I really just mean ‘making sure that the data ends up in all the right places.’ Whenever a piece of data changes in one place, it needs to change correspondingly in all the other places where there is a copy or derivative of that data.
  2. TremulaJS — sweet carousel, with PHYSICS.
  3. Project Advice (Daniel Bachhuber) — for leaders of distributed teams. Focus on clearing blockers above all else. Because you’re working on an open source project with contributors across many timezones, average time to feedback will optimistically be six hours. More likely, it will be 24-48 hours. This slow feedback cycle can kill progress on pull requests. As a project maintainer, prioritize giving feedback, clearing blockers, and making decisions.
  4. YAGNI (Martin Fowler) — cost of build, cost of delay, cost of carry, cost of repair. Every product manager has felt these costs.

Not just the government’s playbook

The 13 principles in the U.S. CIO's Digital Services Playbook are applicable for everyone.

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Whenever I hear someone say that “government should be run like a business,” my first reaction is “do you know how badly most businesses are run?” Seriously. I do not want my government to run like a business — whether it’s like the local restaurants that pop up and die like wildflowers, or megacorporations that sell broken products, whether financial, automotive, or otherwise.

If you read some elements of the press, it’s easy to think that healthcare.gov is the first time that a website failed. And it’s easy to forget that a large non-government website was failing, in surprisingly similar ways, at roughly the same time. I’m talking about the Common App site, the site high school seniors use to apply to most colleges in the US. There were problems with pasting in essays, problems with accepting payments, problems with the app mysteriously hanging for hours, and more.

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