Niko Heikkilä

May 30, 2021

Craftsman's Log – 2021.05.30

This week, I started recording my overall mood with the Daylio app. It's delightfully simple to use and reminds you that even bad days can be rare, even if you generally feel low. Best mindfulness.

I
finished the Practical Remote Pair Programming book—more about the benefits and pitfalls of pairing in my blog.

Marty Cagan
hits the spot in his article Product vs Project Teams. While project teams look like an ideal and cost-effective solution on paper, they have several pain points. Companies often draw people from a pool of resources, make them fully utilised, and see how they amass a considerable technical debt. The project team then throws the result over the wall for new maintainers to suffer. Empowering and steering your teams towards long-lasting product teams seems to be the most feasible solution.

I've been a huge fan of Julia Evans' wizard zines, and it's delightful to notice they are now available online. How about going to educate yourself on debugging, for example?

I'm a sucker for stories where companies improve their processes based on data. Double the interest when the Theory of Constraints is involved. Here's a story of one company whose change lead time (CLT) was dropped from 10 hours to under one hour by observing their data.

More data stories incoming! GitHub published a study where they found that developers are more productive when their days are not filled with meetings, interruptions happen rarely, and continuous progress towards the goals. CEOs, listen to your people.

Paul Graham
wants to write simply. In short, meaningful sentences. No fancy buzzwords. Not everyone is a native English speaker. That's why I must write simply too. Please, let me know if you find my text or source code hard to read. I shall improve.

About Niko Heikkilä

Hey there! I'm a Software Craftsman and Extreme Programmer. Currently, I do DevOps at Polar Squad. I build proprietary software for a living and loving it as much as free and open-source software. Follow this blog for insights on tech, culture, politics and all the small things.

For shorter ruminations, follow me on Mastodon and Bluesky.