Jessitron

It is sort of a followup to the previous post: http://blog.jessitron.com/2012/09/confessions-of-woman-in-tech.html

Fred Brooks had it right oh so many years ago. Communication is an exponential cost, so the more skills that you can give to a single person, the more they can do. But it's even better than that, as every time communication occurs you are playing a game of telephone with translation errors. The essential complexity might be very easy, but when you need to translate that problem from users to project managers to architect to developer(and I'm sure many teams have many more layers than this) the complexity grows out of control. I thought about this topic when the StackOverflow blog on Scrum ruining great engineers came out[0]. Imagine you have a chart where the x-axis is trust, and the y-axis is skill. x-axis at the far left is management focused. x-axis all the way to the right is developer focused. x-axis in the middle is mutual trust. bottom y-axis is no skill, top y-axis is extremely skilled. Now let's look at some of the spaces this chart provides. If we start at the top right, we have Professors. They have a lot of skill and have tenure to be able to do what they want. On the bottom right, I imagine something like Adam Sandler's character from Billy Madison(1995), a son of a billionaire who wasted his life and had no productivity. On the bottom left side we have government contractors or outsourced developers. They do the work they are told to do. In this spot Scrum can be a reasonable way to filter between the very least skilled workers and someone who is doing…

It's also called the law of "Uphill Analysis, Downhill Invention" which states "It is much more difficult to guess the internal structure of an entity just by observing its behavior than it is to actually create the structure that leads to that behavior." Been reusing and repeating this one quite a lot, since I saw it mentioned in one of this year's RubyConf keynotes: https://blog.jessitron.com/2019/11/05/keynote-collective-problem-solvi… (There is a blog-post version behind this link as well, in case anybody wanted to skim the contents rather than watch video of the entire talk to find out how it fits in.)

Also has a great list of other blogs, most of which are my favorites now too. https://jvns.ca/blog/2016/04/09/some-of-my-favorite-blogs/ here's a copy+pastable list: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/ http://danluu.com/ https://aphyr.com/ http://www.elidedbranches.com/ http://composition.al/blog/2015/03/31/what-isnt-a-key-value-store/ https://www.harihareswara.net/sumana/2016/03/29/0 http://blog.plover.com/aliens/dd/intro.html http://blog.jessitron.com/2015/06/ultratestable-coding-style.html http://akaptur.com/blog/2014/08/03/getting-started-with-python-interna… http://accidentallyquadratic.tumblr.com/post/142387131042/nodejs-left-… http://embedded.fm/blog/takingaparttoys http://gigasquidsoftware.com/blog/2012/09/20/7-john-mccarthy-papers-in… https://mathbabe.org/2016/03/30/apple-vs-fbi-nobody-won/

That is quite fascinating. I do somewhat wonder if some of that can be lessened by using more "property based testing"[1]. Property based testing can be thought of writing tests that describe the functionality you are trying to cover. It then interpolates (not too unlike fuzzing actually) to come up with every way that might be non-compliant and then checks to ensure your hypothesis holds up. Amusingly enough, the most active python property based testing library is named hypothesis[2], which describes quite well how you write unit tests using it. [1] http://blog.jessitron.com/2013/04/property-based-testing-what-is-it.ht… [2] https://hypothesis.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Similarly, if Jessitron (singling her out solely because she wrote a really good blog post today [1]) wants to talk about microservices in clojure, and folks want to keep her out because of her views on women in technology, you are ok with that also? Let me also emphasize that no one disputes that strangeloop has the legal right to do this. The discussion is simply over whether the strangeloop organizers are a bunch of anti-intellectuals who deserve to be in the spotlight for their decisions. [1] http://blog.jessitron.com/2015/06/ultratestable-coding-style.html

This is what I was referring to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickCheck http://blog.jessitron.com/2013/04/property-based-testing-what-is-it.ht…

Some links I've saved. That said, there's no accounting for taste: https://tylr.fun/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30440123 https://world.hey.com/dhh/google-suffers-from-a-digital-petro-curse-90… https://vpostrel.com/ https://h3rald.com/ https://bastian.rieck.me/blog/posts/2022/boring/ http://diveintohtml5.info/storage.html https://moxie.org/stories.html https://trevorklee.com/my-terrible-plan-for-reducing-opioid-deaths/ https://mzrn.sh/2021/11/14/how-i-helped-build-a-profitable-mvp-over-a-… https://kilianvalkhof.com/2021/web/prescriptive-software-is-better-tha… https://jessitron.com/2021/11/28/software-development-pushes-us-to-get… https://www.tariqislam.com/posts/kubernetes-docker-dep/ https://p4bl0.net/post/2022/01/The-Truth-on-the-Blockchain https://www.indiehackers.com/post/what-are-the-most-beautiful-landing-… https://alexgaynor.net/2020/nov/30/why-software-ends-up-complex/ No list would be complete without: https://thebestmotherfucking.website/ http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/