Zef Hemel

At Localyze we just finished our annual performance reviews cycle. This year I got feedback not only from my manager but also anonymous 360° feedback from peers and, for the first time, feedback from my direct reports. Of course, there are always areas and ways to improve, but overall I am very satisfied with the review. Nothing unexpected was brought up, and there was lots of positive feedback and a bit of actionable advice how to improve. Like many software engineers, I often experienced signs and symptoms of the impostor syndrome during my career. However, after more than 16 years in the industry, I finally feel confident about my technical skills and experience as a software engineer. But as a manager, I still have lots of doubts. For too long, I avoided doing people management because I thought it would be too hard and demanding for me having meaningful, helpful and sometimes difficult conversation with reports on a daily basis. And I have high expectations of what makes a good manager. Having integrity is an important aspect, I want to be recognized a transparent, trustworthy, and emphatic leader. Therefore, this short paragraph from my performance review was my highlight. It makes me very happy, and I am very proud that the people around me perceive me being empathic and see it as one of my greatest straights.  Because the feedback was anonymous, I don't know who to thank. But: Thank you very much, teammate. This paragraph means a lot to me, because it means that I am on the right track.

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One aspect of #softwareDevelopment I cared more about than anything else over the years is #accessibility. I have written countless articles - well, 45 so far - on the topic, and last night I decided to make all 45 of them free to read on my Medium site indefinitely. This is my way of helping the world and the web be a better, more inclusive place. Feel free to bookmark this list, share it, reference it. You may credit me, if you quote any of it, but I am not forcing you to. I am making this list public domain (with optional attribution), because I am hoping at least one more person realises the crucial importance of a world that everyone can access, and doesn't just like this post, but does something about it. #accessibilityMatters #webDesign #uxDesign #accessibilityAwareness #webDevelopment https://lnkd.in/ebxH8YKh

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Scaling culture through 𝘃𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲𝘀 and 𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘀 with minimal friction. "People are not behaving as we expect" A common observation from execs in scaling companies. Let's stop for a moment. Has anyone explicitly shared the current culture? Culture, simply put, is the "way things work around here" If culture is not explicitly defined. People pick up on culture through observation: → Who gets acclaim and promotions? → Leadership values and behaviour → Who gets fired → Process However, as companies scale, observation alone breaks down: → Rapid influx of people from differing cultures can cause friction → Company leaders are less visible day to day → Opaque staffing decisions → Process misunderstood 𝗣𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗴𝗲𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗿𝘂𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝘄𝗿𝗼𝗻𝗴 Culture becomes diluted or misaligned to the original intent. Frustration all around 𝗦𝗼 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝗱𝗼 𝘄𝗲 𝗳𝗶𝘅 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀? 𝘌𝘹𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘵 𝘷𝘢𝘭𝘶𝘦𝘴 and 𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘪𝘱𝘭𝘦𝘴 𝗩𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲𝘀 - beliefs that are deemed important 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘀 - rules of thumb that guide decision making A quick example from Apple. Value        → Design Principle  → Attention to detail 𝗗𝗼𝗻'𝘁 𝗰𝗼𝗽𝘆 Don't be tempted to directly copy from a successful company. You are not Apple. Think carefully about your own beliefs and principles as a leadership team. What has driven your success so far? 𝗖𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 Several years ago the company I was working for got acquired. New CEO comes in and makes the culture we can expect explicit. This is how I run the business: • 𝗩𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲𝘀 and why • 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘀 and how they have been helpful   Furthermore they had some additional performance principals that outlined valued behaviours. The result? 𝗖𝗹𝗮𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘆 People understood the rules. Are your cultural ideals explicit or implicit?

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Should you rebuild something from scratch or fix the current solution? The choice isn't obvious, and both approaches have pros/cons. Unfortunately, I think too often Individual Contributors (ICs) want to do the former. I understand - building new is fun and exciting. But it usually comes with a huge cost: time to develop, test, adopt, migrate, scale, etc. Also, guess what… your new solution won't be perfect and will need fixes and maintenance, just like the thing being replaced. So, make a conscious decision. Look at both options and think about the business first. #dataengineering #dataarchitecture

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☕ The Coffee-Driven Code Review Manifesto: A Sleep-Deprived Guide to Excellence [Everyone talks about clean code, but let's be honest - most of our best reviews happen after that third espresso shot] 🌅 6 AM: First Commit Code looking pristine Tests all green Documentation spotless Reality: Haven't written a single line yet ☀️ 9 AM: The Morning Stand-up Revelation "Wait, did I just promise to deliver this by EOD?" Frantically opens IDE Types while drinking coffee Spills coffee on keyboard Git commits anyway 🌮 12 PM: The Lunchtime Code Review PR Comment: "Interesting choice of variable names. Is 'pizzaTime' really the best name for a payment processing function?"  Me: "I was hungry when I wrote that..." 🌙 5 PM: The Final Push git commit -m "Fixed everything (hopefully)"  git push origin please-work  git prayer --recursive 📊 Our Revolutionary Metrics: Bugs Found vs Coffees Consumed (1:1 ratio) Time Spent Reviewing vs Time Spent Making Memes About Code Number of "LGTM" Comments That Actually Meant "I Trust You” 🎯 Pro Tips for Sleep-Deprived Reviews: If the code works on the fifth try, it's probably production-ready Comments like "Magic. Don't Touch." are perfectly acceptable documentation If you can't explain your code, blame it on the keyboard 🤔 The Real Code Review Checklist: Does it work? No one knows why it works But it works Ship it! 💭 Question for fellow night owls: What's your record for most consecutive hours staring at a PR before realizing you were looking at the wrong branch? #CodingLife #TechHumor #SoftwareEngineering #DeveloperLife #CodeReview #CoffeeDriver Development #TechMemes

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🌟 New Article Alert! 🌟 I've just published an article on Medium: Demystifying Clean Architecture in Go: Separating Fact from Fiction. 🎉 https://lnkd.in/e6pnqEPz In this piece, I dive into the fascinating (and often misunderstood) world of Clean Architecture, exploring how its principles can be adapted to the simplicity and power of Go. From flat project structures to more elaborate designs, I've included practical examples to illustrate how we can balance clarity, scalability, and testability. Whether you're a seasoned Go developer or just curious about software architecture, I hope you'll find this article insightful and relatable. 💬 I'd love to hear your thoughts, experiences, or even challenges you've faced while applying Clean Architecture principles in your own projects. Let's keep the conversation going! #golang #go #cleancode #cleanarchitecture #softwarearchitecture Check it out and let me know what you think! 👇

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The cost of poor quality is far higher than the cost of good #QA. At Quarry, we've seen firsthand how good QA can make or break a project. Why is QA so crucial? Let's break it down: Bugs are expensive. Catching them early? That's just smart business. User experience is everything. QA ensures your site works as smoothly as it looks. It's your reputation on the line. A glitchy site with delays is a fast track to lost customers. Security matters. QA helps catch vulnerabilities before the bad guys do. It saves time and cost in the long run. Trust us, fixing major issues post-launch is a hassle. QA isn't just about finding bugs. It's about ensuring your product meets your objectives and delights your users. But here's where it gets tricky: Many organizations undervalue QA. They see it as an extra cost rather than a necessary part of the process. We do things differently. At Quarry, QA is baked into our process. It's not an afterthought — it's a core part of how we deliver value. Have you ever launched a project without thorough testing? #QualityAssurance #WebDevelopment #BestPractices

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Last week's DDD Europe was a blast. It seemed architecture was the theme, as session after session touched on it. Many teachable moments and things to revisit once the videos are published. My session on Friday morning was fun - at least for me 😅 We dived into the pros and cons of various approaches to testing collaboration between objects. "In memory" test doubles vs. mocks and stubs, fixtures vs. builders, different approaches to TDD ("London" or "Chicago") and of course: separating logic and context / side-effects entirely. The point was to get and stay in that mode of pros and cons. Test doubles, builders, fixtures, they allow you to progress quickly, but may cause you to suppress feedback on your design choices. Going ham on SRP might cause isolated, simple-to-test code, but at the cost of more files (and more things to name!). It's all trade-offs! The workshop did not go as I had planned. We discussed and debated merits of approaches much more than I had scheduled. The level of experience and insight the attendees brought was amazing, way beyond my expectation. While I'm sad we did not really get into the second assignment, the discussion was "great too" 😉 There are a couple of thoughts I'm left with after the workshop that I'd still like to share: * All the exchanged approaches have their merits and drawbacks; be open about the drawbacks of your approach and try out other styles every now and then! * What level of unit/integration/e2e test suite you're aiming for depends heavily on the project in question. The requirements of the project and the planned properties of the product should feed into your choices on pyramids / ice cream cones / diamonds * One important aspect on testing that was later mentioned in passing in Aki's session is that a unit should be a "black box", its inner workings obscured from the outside, and only its observable behaviour should be under test * Corollary to that; if you experience complexity trying to observe the behaviour of a unit, then that is feedback on your design. * Processing feedback by making it go away (with test doubles, fixtures / builders or other "pain killers") is prohibiting you from designing different / better systems * Relentlessly turning context ("input side effects") into parameters and side effects into return values will eventually lead you to the pattern: load history, apply command to history, produce an amended history. I.e. event sourcing. Some final things to check out: * Growing Object Oriented Software Guided by Tests is a cool book! * The transformation priority premise is a cool thing to check out for TDD aficionados * The SRP can be difficult to actually apply in a discussion (as it is not super objective), but the Integration Operation Separation Principle might be easier for you (https://lnkd.in/eZdFSGM2) * Before jumping to event sourcing, check out Functional Core, Imperative Shell #ddd #dddeu #software #testing

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"Alex didn’t just fix QA; he changed the trajectory of the company." Don't undermine the potential that QA professionals can bring to your business.

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The Daily Retrospective “At first we were holding retrospectives every two weeks or so. We would pick something to improve and spend the next two weeks trying to make the improvements. While this was working well, we sensed that it was too long between sessions. Sometimes when an issue comes to our attention it might be better to address it right away rather than waiting for a week or two. Why wait when we can possibly make improvements in the meantime? Is there any real reason to wait? We decided to try to meet more frequently and eventually started holding a very short retrospective at the end of each day. These short but very frequent retrospectives really turned up the good. This is like “continuous delivery” but for process improvements. We deliver improvements daily and use the feedback to steer to the next step we want to take. Another practice we discovered is the “just-in-time” retrospective. Whenever a team member would notice anything particularly interesting, important, insightful, or surprising, we would hold an “instant retrospective”. It’s turned out to be a very useful approach to reflect on something while the experience is fresh in our minds. As a team, we like to use retrospectives to reflect, tune and adjust every chance we get. The more the better. We’ll cover more about the Daily and Just-In-Time retrospectives in the “Turn Up The Good” chapter.” ― Woody Zuill, Kevin Meadows https://lnkd.in/gptmBTE #MobProgramming

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I could not agree more. Recent articles about "ghost developers' based on the number of GitHub commits reflects an incorrect perception of how hard software developers working in different roles. I was also annoyed by the notion that somehow, there are 10% of developer's 'coasting' and getting paid hundreds of thousands. This happens in all industries not just software development. https://cstu.io/d41234

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2024 is nearly over. Did you already invest in yourself? Maybe you still have budget left for your personal development? If you want to build up your skills on product development, I have two great recommendations for you - both for product, design, and engineering people: 1️⃣ November 6+7 the Tech Leadership Summit will take place in Zurich, co-located with the renowned Product Management Festival. One ticket buys you access to both! My discount code "DiscountSpeakerTLS" will cut the price by 20% - but the value stays at 120%! 2️⃣ November 13+14 will see the Digitale Leute Summit in Cologne. You can learn from amazing talks, but also join full day content-packed workshops. My discount code "DLS24JAN20" will give you 20% off of tickets. Spoiler alert: 2025 will also bring its challenges. 😉 Set yourself up for success! The direct links are in the comments. Disclaimer: Okay, okay - I will also give talks at both, but you can easily go to the other talks instead. 😘

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✍🏻 New post on the zeroheight blog: As a follow-up to the livestream with Garrison Snelling, I share the benefits of adding code examples in your #DesignSystem documentation and how to do it with StackBlitz: https://lnkd.in/eTywhvSU

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We're looking for a senior-staff PM now at Honeycomb, who will drive and own a multi-year vision for a net-new, permanent and significant expansion of Honeycomb's product surface area: https://lnkd.in/g2sM_TfC I’ve sat in this role for 3.5 years now, on and off, so you’ll be inheriting a lot of my regretful decisions. But I’m here to help you navigate that! It involves big data (for real), deep OSS involvement, lots of customers who love the product, and a great team to boot. If you like the idea of thinking through how you’ll turn 10M events per second into 100k, without breaking the bank, and making it as semi-automatic as possible, without losing signal on that data, and building a compelling UI that lets people build and monitor this stuff, this might be up your alley! Wanna talk with tons of customers and spicy sales engineers who have to sometimes commit code crimes to make stuff work, and then tell you about it? Wanna make painful prioritization decisions? Wanna find a way to execute on a multi-year vision and not get lost along the way? Click the link above. Wanna eat shit in front of a customer whose exact set of constraints violates every tradeoff decision you made? And then go back to them 4 months later with the good news that you’ve fixed it all? Come say hi! Wanna try to wrap your head around someone's perceived notions of how observability works, and find creative ways to reorient their worldview? Hi hello please apply. Wanna get deeply involved in the #opentelemetry community, become a core contributor, attend lots of community events, and be continuously infused with customer problems and feedback and also overall industry directions? You know what to do. Wanna work with a very product-minded engineering team who will push you to get stuff done? Wanna be a part of a group that is usually fast, usually right on the first go of things, and isn't afraid to try things and maybe pull them back if they're not working? Wanna have fun too? Clicky clicky.

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I'd like to challenge my network with a question: Do you interrupt sprints for urgent user stories? If yes, what are your arguments? I’ve shared my perspective on how to handle this situation https://lnkd.in/deGPEnTW But I'm more interested in hearing about your experiences. How do you balance the need for agility with the cost of disrupting planned work?

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.NET Developers - In the Event Sourcing pattern, data is stored as a series of events, providing context for app state. In this video, AWS Community Builder Nick Chapsas explains how to get started with event sourcing in .NET with an Amazon DynamoDB example. #dotnet #AWS https://lnkd.in/gVKQ9QCb

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Time to be fair.... In past posts, I have been less than complimentary of the DLC regulations that now make it more difficult to implement SMS into an application. I understand that all sorts of organizations use (and misuse) SMS millions (billions?) of times daily. I get that the new regulations make an attempt to reduce, as much as possible, SMS Spam. All in all, it just seemed like another example of hand-cuffing the good guys while trying to put some limits on the bad actors. My experience at the time was with #Twilio... and I tried to make it very clear that my frustration wasn't necessarily with them - they were doing the best they could to handle an avalanche of organizations trying to comply with new rules that everyone was stumbling their way through. I've been using Twilio for years and can't complain AT ALL about the platform performance for my particular small-scale needs. It was the nearly impossible approval process that really soured me. After nearly a year of living without application-based SMS (email only), I decided to revisit. The application was already all wired up for the feature - it was just dormant. This time around I was able to get up and running in 3 days... 99% of which was the DLC approval - which happened today. Kudos #Twilio for suffering through the tough days and making SMS once again something that can be done with very little pain. #twilio #sms #dlcapproval

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You might already be familiar with the F.I.R.S.T. principle—it’s a cornerstone of effective testing. But here’s the thing: while it’s easy to nod along, certain aspects often get overlooked, even by experienced developers. Let’s break it down: F – Fast: Speed keeps the feedback loop efficient. I – Independent: Tests shouldn’t rely on each other—flakiness kills confidence. R – Repeatable: A test that only works sometimes is no test at all. S – Self-validating: This is where many stumble. Tests must pass or fail without interpretation. If you’re debugging why a test failed, it’s not self-validating. T – Timely: Writing tests first is key, but let’s face it—how many of us consistently apply test-first or true TDD? In my blog post (linked in the comments), I dive deeper into these principles and share examples to help you apply them effectively—especially the often-missed Self-validating and Test-first aspects.

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