#talks

Data regulations for developers

Hopefully your organization has excellent legal representation. Also hopefully, those lawyers are not spending their days watching you code. That's not going to be fun for them or you. You should absolutely use lawyers as a resource when you have questions or aren't sure if something would be covered under a specific law. But you have to know when to ask those questions, and possess enough knowledge when your application could be running afoul of some rule or another.

It's also worthwhile to your career to know these things! Lots of developers don't, and your ability to point them out and know about them will make you seem more knowledgeable (because you are!). It will also make you seem more competent and capable than another developer who does not – again, because you are! This stuff is a skillset just like knowing Django.

That's not "real" scrum: Measuring and managing productivity for development teams

By far, the biggest reason I see scrum failing to deliver is when the ceremonies or ideas or data generated by scrum gets used for something other than delivering value to the end users.

It’s completely understandable! Management broadly wants predictability, the ability to schedule a release months out so that marketing and sales can create content and be ready to go.

But that’s not how scrum works. Organizations are used to being able to dictate schedules for large releases of software all at once (via waterfall), and making dev deliver on those schedules. If you’re scheduling a featureset six months out, it’s almost guaranteed you’re not delivering in an agile manner.

Beyond “clean” code: Focusing on practical (vs. aesthetic) aspects

I grew up on Clean Code, both the book and the concept. I strove for my code to be “clean,” and it was the standard against which I measured myself.

And I don’t think I was alone! Many of the programmers I’ve gotten to know over the years took a similar trajectory, venerating CC along with Code Complete and Pragmatic Programmer as the books everyone should read.

But along the way, “clean” started to take on a new meaning. It’s not just from the context of code, either; whether in interior design or architecture or print design, “clean” started to arise as a synonym for “minimalism.”

I wanted to find an approach, a rubric, that allowed for more specificity. When I get feedback, I much prefer hearing the specific aspects that are being praised or need work on - someone telling me “that code’s clean” or not isn’t particularly actionable.

Intersectiona11y: AI, accessibility and the future of work

Solutions come in all sizes. The problem in tech (and many other industries, I presume) is that our processes and workflows are structured in such a way that the solutions for a given problem tend to be clustered around the smaller side of the scale.

Small issues have small solutions. The problem is when you don’t step back and take a bigger-picture view of the situation - do all of these disparate problems actually stem from a particular source? Very often, developers are not only encouraged but actually mandated to stick to whatever story they’re on, for fear of going out of scope.

While that might make sense from a top-down control perspective, that style of thinking tends to permeate a lot of the other work that gets done, even up to larger-scale issues. Diversity is left to HR, or to a diversity committee, to take care of. In many cases, how and where to include AI in an application is left up to individual departments or teams. Remote work, a topic extremely divisive of late, is being eliminated or limited left up to “manager discretion” rather than actually looking at the benefits and harms that are associated with it. A cause extremely close to my heart, accessibility, is frequently treated as an add-on or left up to a handful of specialists to implement (or, worse, a third-party plugin).

These things not only don’t have to, they shouldn’t be left up to small groups to implement or reason through. They should be baked-in to how your organization makes decisions, builds software and interacts with its people.

Your frontend is not your backend: Using data transfer objects to keep your code focused

Today I want to talk about data transfer objects, a software pattern you can use to keep your code better structured and metaphorically coherent. It’s a tool that can help you stay in the logical flow of your application, making it easier to puzzle through and communicate about the code you’re writing, both to yourself and others.

The DTO is one of my go-to patterns, and I regularly implement it for both internal and external use.
I’m also aware most people already know what pure data objects are. I’m not pretending we’re inventing the wheel here - the value comes in how they’re applied, systematically.