Micah Snyder

Sent out a bunch of invites for ShopDev Alliance this weekend. I'm finding it real interesting that some folks don't really put any sort of effort into an online presence, or an online application for a paid Slack community that positions itself as being for experienced Shopify Devs. Maybe we're not doing a good enough job setting expectations. To fix that, here are some signals that can help convey you are an experienced developer (to other developers or technical stakeholders) - Website Arguably, this doesn't tell me much. Anyone can spin up a website simply enough. But at least it tells me you've got the "bare minimum" setup invested. Bonus points though if your portfolio site is on a customized Shopify theme. Professional Social Media Presence We focus on individuals in SDA. I don't want you applying as an agency. Anyone can spin an organizational account up online so I want to see a personal profile that has some actual information. Posts are some version of helpful content, but realistically doesn't always tell me much. Not every developer or freelancer has the time to create content - it's incredibly time consuming. You know what I can see with your profiles? Comments. Everyone who spends any amount of time online leaves comments. If all your comments are just responding to someone's post to get their "top 20 tips for CRO" then you're not gonna make it. If you only post, "yes, I'm interested check DMs" for someone looking for help on a job, you're not gonna make it. Checking in on replies and comments, I can "listen in," to real online conversations and get a sense on whether or not you're a developer. Publicly Accessible Code References It can be a Github or Gitlab profile, just someplace online that indicates you're touching code at some point. I don't even always need to see repos - know what I can see? Contributions. You don't have to be building in public. Github can show contributions for private and public repos. Code Pen can also be a good place to show off code samples as well. Any Form of Content Creating any form of content online, whether it's your website in a blog post or tutorial, a YouTube channel, on your social handles, etc. can help give a sense on your technical abilities. Content includes public coding projects, so open source contributions or publicly accessible code in Code Pens even are a great way to showcase some form of skill. Don't just rely on completed projects. Talk about a technical problem related to those projects. It's easy to copy a boilerplate anything from somewhere online. --- The next steps for SDA will likely revolve around relying on personal referrals from active members. We have a global group covering many timezones and cultures, so it is definitely not a perfect process currently. We're always going to be learning and growing. Hopefully this is helpful in some regard so others can grow too. Because if I'm looking for this stuff, you better believe others are too.

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Product is fun, complex, messy, and there are no shortcuts. Once you accept that—and embrace it—amazing things happen to your career. Cat Hicks, PhD puts this better than anyone: "Doing research with developer teams, something that really strikes me is how much people look for ways to make complex problems easy rather than make it easy to work on complex problems What I mean is, sometimes it's really useful to admit we just are trying to accomplish tough things. Asking how we can support our teams who NEED the time and space to work through that, it's often a much more tractable lever than trying to change the inherent nature of the work I think it behooves me to say as a psychologist here that I think people are actually really excellent at working on complex problems! It's one of the reasons research with developers is so great. Overall devs love to learn, love to be curious, love to innovate. It is core stuff. What would it look like if we could ask, "how do I make this the absolute best environment for complex problem-solving" instead of "how do I take away all these annoying hard problems." The stuff we want to accomplish in the world is hard. But can be joyful to accomplish."

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Dev agencies, if you don’t want to be treated as a commodity, stop acting like one. - Learn the business context for engineering needs - Stop squeezing your clients every opportunity you get - Prioritize transparency, communication, and accountability In short, position yourself as a partner that uses tech to solve business problems. You really can’t complain about being seen as a commodity if you treat everything as a transaction.

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NEW: Internal Threads Internal threads allow you to spin up conversations in Slack from Pylon. It's great when you want to start a conversation with someone, but they primarily use Slack (e.g. engineers, product people or anyone who isn't living out of the support system). Common internal threads we are creating at Pylon: 1/ #bugs to report a potential bug 2/ #project channels to ask a team a question about a specific feature 3/ #feedback to report product feedback to the team It's been one of the most game-changing features we've released and we're so excited to share it with everyone. Enjoy!

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Question for engineering leaders (managers, directors, VP's, etc): I'm curious about the current landscape of developer productivity analysis + management tools - things like LinearB and Jellyfish. Which tool, if any, are you using? Any opinions/pros/cons on the tool you're using (or the entire domain overall)?

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More evidence that "boring is good". There has long been a low level conflict between designers, who often want to make things look good, and developers, who often want to make things work good (bad grammar, but stick with me). Most experienced developers will nod when you say "boring is good" - it means things are working as they should, there is no excitement, and no major problems. Modern designers are *often* very focused on UX, so they are more likely to be somewhat in line with the developer - simple, clean, and clear UIs are better for users. They will usually take this even further by making their designs contextually dynamic and trying to show the user the things they need to see and the "best next action" they should take. This is a great, and short, post about this topic... showing that even something as simple as a sign-up screen can easily fail to convert if you try to make it "too pretty." Keep it simple, keep it clean, and make it work reliably. And always listen to good designers... you may not always agree, but they are often right about UX.

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Have you ever thought about how compliance laws are a lot like design systems? I recently spoke with Joe Toscano, founder of DataGrade, and he made a fascinating comparison. Joe explained how Brad Frost's atomic design methodology took an engineering approach to design: → Creating standardized elements → Templatizing them → Scaling them across a system This led to the rise of human interface guidelines (HIGs) from tech giants like Google, Apple, and IBM. But here's where it gets really interesting: Joe argued that privacy laws and regulations are like the ultimate HIG for product design. Just like how HIGs provide rules and constraints for design systems... Compliance laws set guardrails for what we can and can't do with user data. If we design something that isn't compliant, it doesn't matter how sleek the UI is. Legal requirements become the top-level framework we have to design within. That's what got Joe into studying laws - to understand this new "design system" for building products. So next time you're cursing a lengthy legal doc or trying to make sense of GDPR... Remember, it's all just part of the atomic design of compliance. — Do you agree with the analogy of compliance laws as the ultimate design system? Why or why not? Hear more of Joe's unique perspectives on the intersection of product, privacy, and law on the latest episode of The Minimum Viable Podcast.

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If you've ever had to deal with inconsistent UX, multiple generations of design systems, and the perpetual back and forth between UI and backend developers - there's hope, you are not alone. And let me just say it out loud - there's no "full stack" development - it is simply impossible for an engineer to stay up to date on all the development across JavaScript, frameworks, Node.js, Kubernetes, Java, etc. You either have deep and somewhat narrow, or broad and shallow. These problems are quite common for everyone who has inherited an existing product (which is like 99.9% of us). This blog post by Kyle Shevlin about building a tightly-enforced composable design system resonated with me. #UI #designsystem #react https://lnkd.in/gStEWHtC

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Junior: "Look at this clever one-liner I wrote!" Mid-level: "I should probably add some comments here." Senior: "Let's refactor this for clarity." Lead: "How can we design this to prevent errors in the first place?" If we write code as cleverly as possible, we're setting ourselves up for debugging nightmares. It's not about writing less code, but about writing code that tells a clear story. Key principles I've learned: 1. Write for humans first, computers second 2. Optimize for readability, then performance 3. Treat comments as an essential feature, not an afterthought 4. Design systems that are hard to use incorrectly Today's clever hack is tomorrow's technical debt. Our job isn't just to solve problems, but to create solutions that stand the test of time and teamwork! #developer #simplicity #coding

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You don't need to be an engineer to be a super effective in product management. Many (of the best founder) excel without super deep technical expertise, despite common misconceptions that suggest otherwise The biggest mistake non technical people "assume" is you hand a developer an idea and they magically create the next Facebook. These are the same people who have no idea what a requirement is or who your customers are. what 90% of engineers do is over-engineer. (for engineer purposes like performance, scalability of platform, optimisations and 100's of other things and lastly about customer outcomes) In startups, you have to flip this script and focus 90% of customer outcomes. ^ This is why Startups really need a "senior, amazing" engineering person. (so you don't go down 1000 engineering rabbit holes) The hardest challenge here and Jason Lemkin agree on is finding that super technical, super customer and team focused startup VP of engineering / CTO / Principal level Dev. NO matter the cost ^

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Here's the fast-track to tech agency mediocrity: Say yes to every project. This is a recurring theme with the agency founders I talk to. But I get it! My agency did the same thing. We treated every project like a life raft, especially in the early days. We were building: • Dental websites • Windows-based software • Multi-tenant e-commerce sites • Real-time insurance quoting systems And that just scratches the surface. But here's the thing... 𝗔𝘀 𝗮 𝗻𝗲𝘄 𝗯𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀, 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘀𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝗳𝗲𝗹𝘁 𝗴𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗅 ✅ Cash flow was steady ✅ Our portfolio grew diverse overnight ✅ We were learning something new every day We were the agency version of "yes, and..." improv. But you know who else took every job? A lot of our competitors. So we end up without any differentiation. In our case we found ourselves: → Starting every project from nothing - no leverage → Burning out faster than a cheap candle → Without an efficient sales process → Without a specialty But our solution wasn't what you think. Everyone says, "niche down." But niching down doesn't have to mean you stop taking a variety of work. We started focusing on a smaller menu. We niched our marketing down. We niched our systems down. We might still take a project that wasn't on the menu. But that's not what we'd optimize for. (so it would have to be worth it $$$) Focusing on projects that combine what you love to do with what your customers value leads to: ✅ Higher quality work ✅ Better client relationships ✅ Differentiation in the market ✅ A team that's energized, not exhausted And that's a recipe for long-term growth for a tech agency. What's another way agencies can differentiate in 2024? ------------------------------- I'm Jason and I never click the "Rewrite with AI" button. Let's talk if you run an XR agency and want more work.

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Ever heard of “ghost developers” or 0.1 X developers? Essentially, they: 1. Try to do as little as possible 2. While still being on a company’s payroll There’s some Stanford research showing they’re more common that we think: https://lnkd.in/dJjxMqhD I thought it was really interesting. I think they’re starting to get caught though (because of things like that study.) Organisations will start laying off more unnecessary staff so they can become more efficient. These developers will be the first to go.

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I've watched companies burn millions on the "big rewrite" dream—only to end up with software that's marginally better (or usually worse) than what they started with. You're going to have developers who want to rewrite your entire codebase from scratch. Don't let them. "But our tech stack is outdated!" "The code is messy!" "We need modern architecture!" Every developer has pitched these lines. I get it. Legacy code isn't sexy. But here's what your "fresh start" actually looks like: ➝ 12-18 months of development time ➝ Zero new features for customers ➝ A shiny new codebase with the same old problems Want to know how the most successful tech companies handle this? They don’t change a thing. Look at Apple. They're still running iOS—not "SuperOS" or "CompletelyNewOS 1.0". The core of their software is built on Unix foundations from the 90s. They're making billions with "outdated" tech because they understand something crucial: Great software evolves—it doesn't get replaced. Let me be crystal clear: A full rewrite will kill your company. Not "hurt." Not "slow down." Kill. As in: You won't exist anymore. I've had dozens of founders tell me "That won't happen to us." Know where they are now? Gone. Your competitive advantage isn't having the prettiest code. It's having code that works, handles edge cases, and delivers value—right now.

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"In solving the specific problem of their function, they had lost sight of the holistic forest through the trees. I've observed companies where the product or design org and the engineering org have their own core model. The models use completely different languages; they don't interact with each other, and no one speaks the same language. They do this because there's a lot of pressure on each org to produce something, and collaborating cross-functionally is difficult. Meanwhile, the business is searching for one simple model to rule them all, which doesn't really exist. As a result, without a viable alternative, the company uses metrics like revenue and NPS (a travesty of statistics and research)." https://lnkd.in/gbk48eS7

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Software agencies often get a bad rep—and for good reason. That’s why, at Tech Swamy, accountability is at the heart of everything we do. Your vision deserves a partner who’s as invested in its success as you are. Check out the full post to see how we’re doing things differently. 👇 #softwareengineering #softwareconsulting #consulting #agencies #agency #saas

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