Tag: Dive Deep

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em

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I don’t have a ton of tech writers that I read regularly, but one that I do is Gergely Orosz. His newsletter, The Pragmatic Engineer, is incredible, full of insights and advice for folks at any point in their technical career journey.

A recent two-part installment discussed in detail the plusses and pitfalls of trying to measure developer productivity, a notoriously difficult problem in software engineering. It’s one I’ve been thinking quite a bit about recently, in an attempt to balance the business need to understand how much value we can deliver per dollar spent, without devolving into a joyless culture of mediocrity that treats its team like coding robots (which, it must be said, they’re not).

If you’re in the same position as me, I’d encourage you to subscribe to the newsletter and give the articles a read-through, but if you’re short on time, I absolutely love this simply-summarized single objective measure:

Weekly delivery of customer-appreciated value is the best accountability, the most aligned, the least distorting.

Yup, that sums it up. Other measures matter, but nothing beats screamingly happy stakeholders.

Amongst The Silos

Amongst The Silos

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Steps I expected to take when creating an Amazon QuickSight instance and connecting it a PostgreSQL database in Amazon RDS:

  1. Write terraform to create the QuickSight instance
  2. Write terraform to create the RDS dataset
  3. Open the QuickSight console and create a dashboard using that dataset

Steps I actually had to take:

  1. Write terraform to create the QuickSight instance only to discover that creation via API is not supported in my region of choice, so had to throw it away
  2. Create the QuickSight instance manually in the console, during which I had to explicitly select that I wanted to give permissions to talk to RDS
  3. Manually edit the resultant IAM policies to include permissions to use the customer-managed keys that encrypt all our resources
  4. Apply a security group to the RDS instance that allows TCP access on port 5432 to the QuickSight public IP addresses in my chosen region
  5. Add a user to PostgreSQL specifically for QuickSight to use, one with a password hashed using an older algorithm, since the QuickSight driver uses a version that lacks support for modern (read: most secure) algorithms
  6. Grant permissions for this user to be able to read the schemas and tables that hold the data I want to visualize
  7. Create the RDS dataset in QuickSight, manually entering the connection details
  8. Create a dashboard using the above dataset

Figuring out a number of the above steps required decoding unhelpful errors, searching through pages of documentation, and other non-trivial efforts. For shame, Amazon, for shame. Y’all should talk to each other more.

Half The Battle

Half The Battle

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Some things are just good to know, for example:

  • git
  • SQL
  • networking protocols (UDP, TCP, HTTP, SSH, DNS)
  • the relative speeds of various storage media (L1, L2 caches, RAM, and disk)
  • the airspeed velocity of an unladen European swallow

Add to that list OAuth2, the lingua franca of authentication. Get yourself acquainted with this helpful two-part series:

Show Me The Data

Show Me The Data

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For Christmas back in 2020 my daughter got me a daily crossword puzzle calendar. That started a streak of completing a puzzle every day for two years. I tracked data on how fast I was able to complete each one, curious if I would get measurably better over time.

Today I finally sat down, put all the data into Excel, and crunched some numbers. Here’s a couple interesting results (interesting to me, at least):

Normally I aimed to complete a puzzle in about 15 minutes. For the most part my results clustered around that value, though my overall average across 623 puzzles was 15.9 minutes thanks to the occasional outliers in the 30-ish minute range. Fastest solve time was 6 minutes, which I accomplished 7 times.

This graph of rolling average (with a 30 day window) pretty clearly shows I got better over time as I suspected, going from a 20-ish minute average at start all the way down to 13-ish minute average towards the end. I’m happy with those results!

In total, I spent 165 hours working crosswords in 2021 and 2022, and while it’s not exactly the world’s most productive activity, there’s enough mental benefit that I don’t regret it.

Just No

Just No

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Can we all agree that “drinking from a fire hose” is a terrible metaphor for the feeling of starting a new job? It’s overused, cliched, and kinda gross.

What I find most funny is that it’s usually stated as a humble brag about the amount of information you can ingest in short order, or to indicate that your new company is some kind of special unicorn doing work so incredibly complex that it overwhelms all who dare join it.

Reality is that the feeling of being overwhelmed in a new role is totally normal, even if the work is banal or the company is pedestrian. Sure, it takes time, but don’t make it sound harder than it is.

Personal Assistant

Personal Assistant

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For some reason unbeknownst to me, health insurance in the United States is tied to employment. So one of the joys of starting a new job is being forced to reevaluate a bunch of plans, choose new options, and in some cases, find new doctors. As it turns out, my previous physician retired last year, so in any case I need to find a new one.

This afternoon I called my preferred medical network to ask about doctors accepting new patients, and the agent informed me that due to a shortage of folks, there pretty much isn’t anyone for the next couple of months. Lovely. I asked about waiting lists or notifications I could sign up for; naturally that doesn’t exist either. The best he could suggest was to check the physician search page every couple of days.

Well, I’m lazy, so I reverse engineered the search API behind the website, wrote a Lambda function to query it periodically, and set up an alarm to email me when the search results come back non-empty. Take that, manual process.

In Medias Res

In Medias Res

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I appreciate people who open up about difficult emotions they’ve experienced in the past. But I appreciate even more people who are willing to discuss them as they are feeling them in the present.

In that spirit, I must confess that this week I’ve experienced considerable Imposter Syndrome. Starting a new job can be overwhelming; doing so when you’re expected to be in charge, even more so, as I’m learning (this is my first time in the latter situation). There’s so much new information to absorb, new people to meet, new customers to understand, and a new culture to internalize. Literally everyone else I talk to knows more than me, and while there’s certainly a grace period, at some point I’ll be expected to earn my salary and contribute, and it’s hard to see when that will be.

Let this serve as a reminder to us all that feelings of inadequacy are normal, especially at times of transition like a new job or getting laid off (which, if that’s you right now, I’m so sorry). I’m telling myself that I’ve been here before, and it’ll be okay. Though I’ll be happy when onboarding is behind me, for sure.

Craft And Commerce

Craft And Commerce

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According to the behind the scenes documentaries, the designers working on The Lord of the Rings trilogy spent countless hours adding details to the various costumes, weapons, and other props used on the film, including details that were on the inside of garments or other places that would never be seen on the screen. They wanted these items to feel real to the actors, but I also imagine there was a simple love of craft that drove them to put their absolute best into their work.

This same attention to detail is applicable to software development. Rarely will an end user ever see the source code that runs her favorite app, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth making just as beautiful as what ends up in the interface. Beauty inspires quality, and there’s some things worth doing well even if just for yourself.

Of course one must balance this against deadlines and the needs of the customer, but whenever possible, pay attention to the details.

Worth A Million Words

Worth A Million Words

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The other day I posted a rundown of my work setup. I thought it’d be fun as a follow-up to give a demo of various microphone options I considered. Besides, you might not often get to see my face, and isn’t it more fun to show than tell?

Shokz OpenRun Pro (headset mic) – It’s mobile, but sounds terrible
Macbook Pro (built-in mic) – Ubiquitous and setup-free, but sounds muffled
Razer Kiyo Pro (webcam mic) – Better, but still a bit of background honkiness
Blue Yeti X (external mic) – Aww yeah, that’s what I’m talkin’ about

What do you think? At what point do you believe there are diminishing returns? Or do you disagree with my quality ordering altogether?

Oh, and for anyone wondering, the quote is from Confucius.

Gut Check

Gut Check

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It’s that time again: New Year’s resolutions! Per my meta-resolution, this year’s book reading target is 44, but I wanted to add a twist to it.

Leaders who are right a lot “seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs.” In 2022, 16 of the 45 books I read in were by authors who were either not male or not white. That’s 36%, a sizable fraction; in line with what I did in 2021 (33%) and 2020 (38%), and much better than my rates in 2019 (18%) and 2018 (15%).

But none of those metrics are anywhere close to reality: about 91% of the world’s population is either not male or not white. That’s a lot of valuable perspectives I’m missing out on.

Given my backlog and some strategic book choices I have lined up, getting all the way to 40 out of 44 isn’t realistic, but I can still do better than my recent history. So in 2023, my plan is to double last year’s fraction to 32 out of 44 (73%). Ambitious but doable. And I can’t wait.

Already finished my first one, in fact: Radical Candor. And I’m a chapter into The Analects, by Confucius. It’s embarrassing that I’ve never read anything by this giant of ancient wisdom. Already found a couple sayings that stand out:

The Master acquires his information by being affable, kind, and respectful, and by showing restraint in his action and a willingness to yield. The way the Master asks for information is different from that of other people.

Do not worry that other people do not know you. But be concerned that you do not know them.

Good stuff!