Jennifer++

Sociotechnical systems

Mental maps, part 2: incidents and observability

We map the system so that we can change the system, so then we must remap the system. That's the tight inner loop of software development.

Sociotechnical systems

Complex vs complicated

A quick and practical summary of what it means for a system to be complex, or not.

Sociotechnical systems

Mental maps for navigating software systems

Learning and exploration in complex systems happens continuously, forever. We need to constantly update our mental maps, or they'll lead us astray

Artificial Intelligence

Losing the imitation game

AI cannot develop software for you, but that's not going to stop people from trying to make it happen anyway. And that is going to turn all of the easy software development problems into hard problems.

DevOps

Automate Thyself

For quite some time, my own ops haven't had much dev in them. But I'm changing that.

Advent of Code in Production

Advent of Code in Production, Day 13: Observability

At this point we've designed a system and we're going to provide it as a service. To operate that service effectively we have to understand how its behaving. That's all about observability.

Advent of Code in Production

Advent of Code in Production, Day 7: Incident Review

If Advent of Code was a whole system, it might look like this. Of course, the first deployment of a complex system is never smooth. This is a review of that incident.

Advent of Code in Production

Advent of Code in Production, Day 6: Operating Environment

Let's talk distributed systems! Getting into the details of how we could build a whole system to support Santa's elves, instead of a bunch of scripts.

Advent of Code in Production

Advent of Code in Production, Days 2-4: Early Development

Continuing my attempt to design a cohesive system that can address the challenges faced by Santa's Elves as they collect magical star fruit.

Advent of Code in Production

Advent of Code in Production, Day 1: Project Kickoff

Explore how you might approach building the solutions to Advent of Code challenges as a production service that you intend to operate long term, rather than as a collection of one-off scripts.

Engineering

Dimensions of Scalability

We are part of the systems we build. When those systems scale, that includes us. The approach we take will determine how successful and how painful that scaling will be.

Engineering

Named Things

This is a cautionary tale. It's the story of an internal tool development project. We'll call it Astro, because naming things is hard, and the reasons why are very instructive.

Interviewing

Culture Fit

We don't evaluate candidates purely on skill. We also assess them socially. I'll explore how to do that, without falling into the trap of dismissing someone as "not a culture fit" due to bias.

Interviewing

Interviewing Software Engineers

Artificial white board programming tests are the wrong thing, but they're easy to assign. Doing the right thing is going to be harder. So what we really need to do is identify what we're looking for in a programmer

Interviewing

Questions for your interviewer

As a candidate, interviews are your chance to learn how the team works, and how the company views and treats their employees. But after enduring your own interview, it's hard to know what to ask or how to evaluate the answers. This should help.

Talks

A Guide to using GitHub for Hacktoberfest

If you want to participate in Hacktoberfest, but you don't have much experience with GitHub, then you've come to the right place.

C#

FizzBuzz? Really?

Yes, it's FizzBuzz, but without the modulo! Exploring FizzBuzz as an interview exercise, and implemented like the children's counting game that inspired it.

Social Justice

Tech Is Not Neutral

Those of us in the tech field like to pretend that it's neutral. We like to pretend that we're neutral. We have to stop.

Engineering

Designing for Testability

The same factors that make your software hard to test will also make it hard to maintain. By adding tests, you can find and fix those things, and so the simple fact of having tests will make your software projects more successful.

Personal

Falsehoods programmers believe about gender (and sex)

Sex and gender are complicated. If you want my advice, it's that your app probably doesn't even need to collect this information.

C#

Maybe don't use StringBuilder

So, should you use StringBuilder? Yes, sometimes. It depends on what your data is like, and what you're optimizing for.

Projects

A 🤷‍♀️ job 💁‍♀️ I 🤷‍♀️ did 💁‍♀️ not 🤷‍♀️ get

And the app I built to feel better after

Engineering

Enabling Refactoring

To succeed at refactoring, you need to make small, incremental improvements. It needs to be continuous. It needs to be habitual. And it needs to be proactive. Because it's not special; it's just a regular part of development. This is continuous refactoring.

Testing

Unit Testing: How do I even?

It hopefully seems obvious that you should test your software. And in particular that you should unit test your software. But, why? And, how? For some reason no one seems to teach this.

Engineering

What language should I learn?

Programming languages are tools used to solve problems, not problems themselves that need to be solved. And so learning to use them should be approached in the same way you would learn to use any other tool. Which is to say: it depends on what you're trying to build.