• 1 min read

Goal Crafting

Link: Goal Crafting: "Goal crafting is one of the most essential leadership activities. Organizational performance and team growth depend on well-crafted goals. Without a good goal-crafting exercise, your teams may focus on what is in front of their noses, solving what seems quickly solvable. Good goal crafting forces you not to ignore or postpone problems that require new ways of thinking, collaboration, or hardships. Without a good goal-crafting exercise, you can get stuck in the status quo or focus on what matters to you or your opinions, not what your stakeholders might need."

The attached article has some good advice regarding goal setting, strategy and prioritization.

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Jade Rubick - Implementing Amazon's single threaded owner model a retrospective

Link: Jade Rubick - Implementing Amazon's single threaded owner model a retrospective: "A Single Threaded Owner (STO), is a single leader that is completely responsible for their area of the product. I share my experiences implementing this model, including the tradeoffs and challenges. And I give the nuts and bolts of how we implemented it and what we learned."

The attached article describes an org structure apparently originated at Amazon, called “single threaded owner” or STO. In a company with multiple products, one common setup is to have separate dev, pm and design groups each covering all products. STO says to have a separate, single manager for each product, the STO. Interesting idea.

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The design decisions and evolution of a method definition - Ruby case study

Link: The design decisions and evolution of a method definition - Ruby case study: "Episode 01 of studying Ruby programming language design decisions, how they evolved with time, and how they look in a wider context."

Attached is a great article that dissects subtle Ruby design decisions, the trade offs made, the decisions, comparison with other languages. Here the focus is just on method arguments.

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How Alexa Dropped the Ball on Being the Top Conversational System on the Planet

Link: How Alexa Dropped the Ball on Being the Top Conversational System on the Planet: "I discuss why Alexa missed the opportunity to take the lead and become the dominant player in the conversational AI market."

Here is a very interesting retrospective on Alexa's AI features and how essentially they blew their lead. Same can be said of Siri. The differnce is that it looks like Apple is doubling down and Amazon? When I say they blew the lead: Alexa was the unchallenged dominant product in the space of home voice activated assistants. There was no other. Read the story...

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System tests have failed

Link: System tests have failed: "When we introduced a default setup for system tests in Rails 5.1 back in 2016, I had high hopes. In theory, system tests, which drive a headless browser through your actual interface, offer greater confidence that the entire machine is working as it ought. And because it runs in a black-box fashion, it should be more resilient to imple..."

DHH declares system tests to be a failed experiment in the attached document. This is surprising to me but then not surprising. Surprised because intuitively it seems that system tests should be better for the stated reasons. And politically because it seems that the Ruby world had accepted that unit tests are easy to write but too brittle. And system tests were more real-life and robust. But not surprised because I have always found system tests a pain to write. But I don’t have large scale experience with that so I tended to agree with the world that system tests (aka end-to-end tests) were better. So here comes #DHH to argue that system tests have failed!

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Smooth Concurrent Updates with Hotwire Stimulus - Blog - Visuality

Link: Smooth Concurrent Updates with Hotwire Stimulus - Blog - Visuality: "It's time to get familiar with another part of Hotwire: Stimulus! In this article, I'll demonstrate using Stimulus to handle more complex frontend logic."

I admit I get confused by the various packages in this family of related low or no JavaScript goodies released by DHH. Hotwire, Stimulus, Hotwire Stimulus (something different, I guess). Some come with rails, some compete with each other. No matter, I love them all. I love the idea of not having to write and debug JavaScript. Here’s an article with code that shows a great use case.

  • 1 min read

Don’t Refactor Like Uncle Bob. Please

Link: Don’t Refactor Like Uncle Bob. Please: "Correction: Throughout this article, I attribute Chapter 2 of Clean Code to Robert Martin, however I was recently informed that this particular chapter was actually authored by Tim Ottinger. That s…"

A nice deconstruction of a refactoring gone bad. The article makes good points and I agree that Uncle Bob’s (tm) refactoring is not great. Oh but apparently a ghost writer wrote that chapter. Now in defense of the book, it was written many years ago and we’ve all gotten a lot smarter about what it means to write Clean Code (tm). Here’s the article: