Oscar Spencer

I once asked a lead engineer on Angular: Which is better: Angular or React? His response: "Both require good engineering to be effective." So, my developer friends, consider this a reminder that "frameworks" like Diátaxis are fine, but they still require good engineering--such as UX, information architecture, style, maintenance processes, and so on--to create great documentation experiences for your customers. Alas, the framework alone isn't enough.

35

7 Comments

You can't make anyone do anything they don't want to do. If you find yourself with a team that isn't shipping fast enough, you can't use tactics to "increase the sense of urgency". You need strategy. And that's a problem for the Engineering Manager, not the individual contributor. Certainly, allowing developers to be co-owners of a project is best practice, but that only works if it's actually true. That is, if a developer suggests a better way and you ignore it, or a VP 2 steps above shuts it down, then the team is going to learn very fast to keep their heads down. You need buy-in from leadership. In other words, if you fake it, your people aren't stupid. They may placate you, but they'll know. The gaming industry is still finding this out... And another nit. If a developer commits to a timeline that is unrealistic the first time, oh well, it happens. But if this keeps happening, then what are you as an Engineering Manager doing about it? Releases are often a point of resource contention. If you're running into situations where you can't release because of an individual bottleneck, it usually points to a process issue that you need to fix, instead of blaming devs for missing deadlines that are hard to predict.

1

Recently I was reading about the VW data disclosure, and I was thinking: could an LLM spot this? So I built a small prototype using PDL script, and the results are pretty good to be honest! More detailed information here: https://lnkd.in/dqJSMPkU

5

On the flip side, many teams configure an excessive number of alerts, often with overly strict thresholds. A significant portion of these alerts are non-actionable, leading to alert fatigue. The common response becomes: 'These alerts are expected,' or 'They’ll self-resolve.' However, effective monitoring is only valuable when alerts are actionable and tied to clear resolution playbooks. Without this, alerts become noise rather than signals, undermining operational efficiency.

8

On this random Wednesday, if you’re a software developer thinking, for no specific reason, about pivoting into the impact space and want to talk about what FreeWorld is doing and why we’re growing so fast and how you can help, please reach out.

68

4 Comments

Woah there, "hiring juniors is about making your entire team better" is exactly the kind of unhelpful, oversimplified headline that needs an A4 sheet of caveats adding. Juniors are a massive investment and the suggestion that simply hiring them will make the team stronger is not right at all. Processes that support the career development of more junior engineers aren't accidental byproducts, they're deliberate. Senior engineers need to be provided the time, headspace, training and support to coach, mentor and develop their more junior colleagues. You know what doesn't work? Hiring juniors into overstretched/under-resourced teams where the seniors are overcommitted and under pressure to meet aggressive deadlines. And I've seen this more times than I care to mention. In the scenario where you've got small teams that are under pressure, and the existing engineers don't have time or headspace to coach someone junior, you are *always* better hiring another senior. Someone who reaches autonomy faster will always be better in that situation. If you hire a junior into that team you won't get better code reviews, more innovation or a richer culture of learning. You'll end up with an under-developed junior who struggles to progress their career, and some seniors who feel like they're doing the junior a disservice by being unable to support them properly. It's horrible. And I've been there. Were we all juniors once? Yep. Should *every* team hire juniors? Absolutely not.

4

If you're the kind of person who's excited about all the recent S3 feature announcements (bucket policy unlocks via temporary root sessions, up to millions of buckets per account, pagination and region filtering for ListBuckets, conditional writes, ListCallerAccessGrants API) and you're attending re:Invent, then you should come to our storage track session, STG306 Advanced security patterns on Amazon S3. Learn how to use all the exciting new stuff securely in the most interactive format available at re:Invent!

94

2 Comments

There are countless ways to enhance your skills, confidence and impact, and Irina Stanescu's post is a good summary. I have one more suggestion. Ask around. You spend so much time with your colleagues, fellow engineers. You program in pairs, you review code, you discuss tickets, and you plan your sprints. Here's the thing: 95% of these discussions is about the short term, and rightfully so, because we're paid to get things done. What about the remaining 5%? 🤔 When was the last time you asked a teammate for a book recommendation? 📚 When did you last watch together a tech explainer video? 🎥 When did you last write a post asking for course recommendations? 💡 At the lunch yesterday, did you share memes or news from the last big conference? 🌍 You can do this today. Tomorrow. Whenever. You don’t need to act on every idea, but you’ll discover new inspiration - and maybe, just maybe, influence your organizational culture toward a stronger growth mindset. 🌱

3

This year, I’ve done 50+ paid mentoring calls with people in roles like Engineering Manager, Director, Back-end Developer, Software Engineer, Principal Engineer, and a few other. For each one of them, my offer was the same - “Take your money back if you didn’t get value from this call”. Two days back, I was talking to a principal engineer and he asked: Why do you give such a guarantee; won’t people exploit it? I told him there are three reasons:  1. I know the value I bring.   All my mentees so far either came back asking for more sessions or requested to stay connected for guidance in future. That confirms that they see the value I bring, and my commitment to their success.  2. It builds trust.   It is hard to trust someone with your hard earned money, so I want to assure people that it is okay to take that first step towards their success. They won’t have anything to lose. 3. I don’t mind refunds.   If someone asks for their money back, it’s either because they didn’t find it worth the money OR because maybe they need that money. Either way, I’m okay with giving it back. It’s simple: I stand by my work.  5-star reviews and repeat bookings are a testament that these conversations matter. Every time I reflect on them, I’m reminded of the positive impact I am able to make with my efforts, and it always feels soooo.. rewarding. I am grateful to all the people who: - connected with me this year, - valued my inputs, - left me ratings and feedback, and - most importantly - trusted me to help them ❤️. What are you grateful for this year?

91

10 Comments

Tech debt causally harms cost-of-change and meantime to adapt to market. You release a defect free, fully functioning piece of software that will *never change* but its code design is a mess. Would you care about tech debt? NO! Why? Because you don't need to change it. It works. It could be written in Whitespace or BrainF**k. Who cares. Nobody is going to look at it. What if it had a tiny change maybe once a year? How much would you care then? A bit more. Maybe Whitespace is ruled out but if it took a couple of days to work out what was happening would there be any business value in paying down the debt? 1 week of refactoring would take nearly 3 years before you break even. Not worth it. This isn't a hypothetical, I have built and maintained software which fits this exact scenario. When does the debt start to have a negative affect on cost-of-change and meantime to adapt to market? Once a quarter? Once a month? Now imagine that you are making hundreds of changes a day. How much is that tech debt costing your business now? And this is assuming that the software is 100% bug free and perfectly functioning. Now extend that, you are making hundreds of changes a day and the internal quality issues are causing you to create bugs which has the knock on effect of harming the user and customer's productivity. Devaluing your product. What's the cost of that debt to your business now? As engineers we need to talk more about how we are protecting and investing in technology in order to reduce cost-of-change and meantime to adapt to market, rather than talk technical debt. Because if we don't need to change or change rarely, then technical debt is not a problem.

39

11 Comments

This may be the best advice for engineers looking to advance in their career. Product impact will take you much farther than technical mastery. Having a product mindset can easily make you stand out and shine ✨ —and of course it’s great for your business. Technical skills clearly matter for engineers, but being savvy about how to create product impact puts you on a totally different level.

26

1 Comment

Being a rubber duck is the path to success... Metaphorically, of course. Rubber ducks don't actually make great software engineers. But while many of you have heard of "rubber ducking" in programming (and some are reading this for the first time going "what the HECK"), how might this apply to problem solving in general? I have noticed that many junior software engineers need to spend a bit more time trying to answer their own problems first. If you keep in mind that someone should be asking you "What have you tried, so far?", then you can start becoming your own rubber duck to bounce ideas off of yourself. Be your own before you make someone else your rubber duck! 👇Check the comments for the full video!👇 ---- 🎬 Check out Dev Leader on YouTube for multiple full-length videos weekly! 🗣️ Share with your network! #softwareengineer #softwareengineers #softwareengineering #problemsolving

10

15 Comments

The day I laid off my last two developers gutted me to my core. My agency suffered the same self-inflicted wound so many others do: 𝗪𝗲 𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗲𝗻𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵 𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲 𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴. If you’ve laid people off, you know the feeling. It’s hard to not be crushed knowing you were responsible. 4 factors that led to this massive failure: — 90% of revenue from just a few clients — We didn’t charge any of them enough — We took all work because we were afraid of the next famine which led too… — Not spending enough time developing our sales pipeline Agency owners will relate to at least one of these (probably more). Unfortunately, the “defense” against this is usually hope. Hope that things won’t implode. Hope that some new work will appear. Hope that people won’t see the writing on the wall and get another job. Hope is a terrible way to run a business. If you can relate to my failure factors, take action. – Time in your sales pipeline is non-negotiable ↳ Start now, put it in your calendar – Diversify your client base ↳ Replace one with 2, then do it again – Don’t take every job ↳ Some really are disasters waiting to happen – Charge more ↳ Creep your rates up, find a differentiating factor or specialization (if you did a thing for 2 clients - you’re a specialist - own it) Which one has you going, “uh, yeah. that’s me”? ------------------------------- I'm Jason and I never click the "Rewrite with AI" button. Message me if you run a tech agency and want help building on LinkedIn.

60

24 Comments

There is a lot of advice out there to use URLProtocols for mocking HTTP requests in your tests, but I think there is a much better way, so I wrote about it: https://lnkd.in/gduS-UhA #swift #swifttesting

10

The entire plot of the Iliad is like one big code review gone bad. You just spent the better part of the week painstakingly building out that killer new feature. In fact, it's some of your best engineering, the unit tests are a work of art, and the function names would make Uncle Bob proud. But not so fast! The next thing you know your work is completely ripped apart by someone more senior. This is what sparked the rage of Achilles! Agamemnon used his opportunity to save the Greek army as a means to assert his dominance over Achilles, rather than leading as he should. Agamemnon took what was treasured by Achilles in front of everyone setting in motion the epic on anger and pride. At one time or another we've all been tempted like Agamemnon when giving a review. So remember, code reviews aren't a means to satisfy our own pride and insecurities about our position. Have you ever been in a code review that felt more like a battle than a collaboration? Let's turn these moments into opportunities to learn and grow with each other rather than using each other. How do you ensure your code reviews are constructive and empowering? "Achilles’ wrath, to Greece the direful spring  Of woes unnumber’d, heavenly goddess, sing!  That wrath which hurl’d to Pluto’s gloomy reign  The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain;" - The Iliad, Book 1

7

1 Comment

How do you get ahead as a new engineer? Writing code in school or a bootcamp is vastly different from writing coding at your first job. In the classroom, your code needs to run just once. In the real world, you write code that goes live and then stays live. Here’s my point: Your learning has only just begun. If you want to stand out as a novice engineer, don’t worry about impressing your boss with error-free code. That’s not going to happen. No manager expects that from you. What do they expect? Embrace the fact that you are still in a learning phase. Ask a lot of questions. Request code reviews from colleagues before you commit. When your code comes back full of errors and corrections, embrace it. Feedback and revisions are a healthy, necessary part of learning how to write better code. There are no stupid questions for a young engineer. Your manager doesn't judge your abilities based on your mistakes. Managers assess your potential on how you respond to those mistakes. Learning and growing matters more than any other skill. You're new. Embrace it. You have a long career in front of you. #engineering #developer

3

Good post. I’ll just add that over-engineering and under-engineering are more orthogonal dimensions than the opposites. One can have neither or one or both. Ditto with “best practices”. A third dimension, almost completely divorced from the above two. This, of course, if you’re working on something tangible and nontrivial. If what you need is another “RESTful API” with “AI capabilities”, deployed via Kubernetes and Terraform, monitored with ELK, and developed and maintained by high-churn mid-to-senior engineers, then by all means use all the best practices you are aware of, and don’t forget to get all the agile coaches within reach onboard!

7

3 Comments