South Software Content Suggestion #13
What I read and watch this week (Friday, October 18, 2024)
We’re back this week with new content to enjoy! Here I review content I consumed in the last week, so you can decide whether to go for it or not.
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Books
Learn Go with Pocket-Sized Projects
No news on this side. I need to finish this book because I also need Go at work.
Articles
How long does it take your team to release a new feature? Cycle time aims at measuring that, and in this short article Martin Fowler suggests how to approach its optimization.
On the concept of dogfooding (“we eat our own dog food”) and why teams that apply this concept can be more effective than those who don’t.
An interesting list of things that are often neglected when a project is started, but deeply missed when the project is developed. They are mostly non-technical but improve by a lot the developer experience
Another short article on software engineering about tidying code, or how to make it better with small, safe changes.
Goodhart's Law in Software Engineering
People, for instance managers or engineers, like to measure things to track progress, among other things. However, in software development many important things cannot be measured: developers productivity, software reliability, employee satisfaction, and so on. The industry standard is to use proxy metrics, which then become the goal. Goodhart’s law: when a metric becomes a goal, it stops being a good metric. From here the article’s conclusions: "use your best engineering judgement".
Podcasts
Do you work with children or have children and want to teach them coding? This interesting conversation uses scientific findings and first-hand experience to suggest what skills to teach them at different ages. Lovely.
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