Beau Scott

Sup fam!! Relationships are everything!! They're the core of your engineering platform. Your team's design docs, software patterns, pull requests, and GitOps workflows all need to pass through a complex network of relationships before becoming meaningful to stakeholders. Before that, they're just bytes sitting on Jeff Bezos' disks. How are your relationships doing? Which relationships need some light touching up? Which ones need some serious investment? How about that one person on that one team? How about on _your_ team? Are you tracking these gaps with the same effectiveness you're tracking tech debt? It takes an intentional effort to build meaningful connections and to show peers you're a stakeholder in _their_ success. It's worth your time -- not to mention you'll feel great!! Want to optimize your engineering platform? Start by investing in your relationships!

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Developer downtime: don’t overwork your devs. It’s memorial weekend and I’m lazily sitting on my porch. My kids keep coming in and out of the house, but get stuck because the sliding door keeps coming off the rails and won’t open. Well, since I’ve got nothing else scheduled for the afternoon I investigate the issue. Turns out sliding doors have a bunch of adjustment screws. I adjust them till the door slides smooth. Left in the broken state my kids learned to hit top left side of the door before opening it. Bringing this back to work, I know customer success teams that have a cheat sheet of these maneuvers. Give devs space to observe, we naturally fix these issues.

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If only they had a service blueprint, outlining how this important flow is accomplished from a user standpoint, to see the different teams and services and components involved… they could fix the gap and make things easier for themselves. I have special respect for Customer Care because they have deal with trying to help upset customers and also deal with the broken systems and services in the company. 💕💕 To the companies trying to modernize, looking at all the software components and coupling first, a word of advice: start with the users! https://lnkd.in/gT7F4hAW

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Time to be fair.... In past posts, I have been less than complimentary of the DLC regulations that now make it more difficult to implement SMS into an application. I understand that all sorts of organizations use (and misuse) SMS millions (billions?) of times daily. I get that the new regulations make an attempt to reduce, as much as possible, SMS Spam. All in all, it just seemed like another example of hand-cuffing the good guys while trying to put some limits on the bad actors. My experience at the time was with #Twilio... and I tried to make it very clear that my frustration wasn't necessarily with them - they were doing the best they could to handle an avalanche of organizations trying to comply with new rules that everyone was stumbling their way through. I've been using Twilio for years and can't complain AT ALL about the platform performance for my particular small-scale needs. It was the nearly impossible approval process that really soured me. After nearly a year of living without application-based SMS (email only), I decided to revisit. The application was already all wired up for the feature - it was just dormant. This time around I was able to get up and running in 3 days... 99% of which was the DLC approval - which happened today. Kudos #Twilio for suffering through the tough days and making SMS once again something that can be done with very little pain. #twilio #sms #dlcapproval

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When I saw this AND there was going to be a video... I am not going to lie. I was expecting FUD. Well done to Filip Hric and Jonathan Canales on keeping it a little sane which is not what I expect when I hear people talking about Cypress.io vs anything. I spend a lot of time looking at ALL frameworks out there to make sure the web is a better place tomorrow than it is today. It's why I enjoyed working at Mozilla and enjoy working at BrowserStack. One of the key things that I liked from both presenters was the fact they expected moving to a new framework from Selenium would make things better but over time it went back to being as flaky as it was with Selenium. Filip even admitted he, as an ambassador, never mentioned that part as it wouldn't look good on blog posts. Even Jonathan mentioned that people moving frameworks if they were to rewrite things using their existing framework with modernised patterns would lead to less flaky tests. Pick the tool that fits your needs, not the shiny one. Being able to break down web apps for testing is a superpower, not what tool you use. I wrote about this before on my newsletter https://lnkd.in/eE2kM5bY? Anyway, Kudos to Jonathan and Filip for not allowing the FUD to creep in!

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OK so the reality of some conferences is pretty grim - very surface-level, vendor-driven content. I'm NOT a fan of 20-minute sessions... I can barely understand the problem being discussed in that amount of time. It just does not work for me. That's where UberConf makes a huge difference. 90 min in-depth sessions, on relevant topics by industry experts and practitioners. Conference size is limited to maintain a very comfortable environment without the need to walk 15 min to your next session, or it gets filled up. ooh... food is also great, fully catered for breakfast, lunch, and dinner (guaranteed great food)! https://uberconf.com/ I'm excited to join the amazing speaker line-up for a third year in a row. The opportunity to engage, share, and learn with the best (both speakers and attendees) is second to none. I've got a couple of new sessions planned, but I am most excited for: Crafting Consistent APIs at Scale: Embracing Linting and Reusable Models. Turns out that creating resources and building APIs in a distributed model is hard (who knew right?)! As teams expand and projects multiply, maintaining a unified API design can pose significant challenges. This presentation delves into the powerful combination of linting and reusable models as tools to navigate these challenges and ensure consistency across large-scale API ecosystems. Come check it out! Discount Code: uber24-travis4

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It is CRAZY how much weaker OpenAI GPT-4o is at coding from the completions API than GPT-4. I'm not sure if this is the intended result, but very surprising nonetheless. The training recency is very evident, i.e. it knows about much more modern things, but the difference between its logical output is great with GPT-4 just thinking in a much more sophisticated fashion.

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BDD vs. Traditional Frameworks: A Comedy 😂 Act 1: The Skeptics: "BDD? Gherkin? More work for no reason! I'd rather wrestle a kraken than write in plain English!" Act 2: The BDD Evangelist: "Hold on, my friends! BDD is like a well-organized toolbox, not a kraken's lair. Let me show you the light!" Act 3: Separation Anxiety (Solved): "With BDD, test cases and code are like a happily divorced couple – living separate lives but still getting the job done. No more Frankenstein test methods!" Act 4: Reusability Rhapsody: "Steps are like LEGOs – build once, use everywhere! Traditional frameworks? More like a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces." Act 5: Hooks – The Heroes of the Hour: "Logging, cleanup? BDD's hooks swoop in like ninjas and handle it all behind the scenes. No more code clutter!" Act 6: Onboarding Nirvana: "Newbies, rejoice! BDD specs are your onboarding manual. Learn the features, copy the steps, become a testing superstar in no time!"

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"I hate meetings" Heard this one before? I mean, I get it. Sometimes it feels like my entire day is just a series of meetings broken up with small bits of "real" work... On the other side of that coin, I know *ahem* SOME people who seem to actually PREFER meetings over "getting things done." Frankly, I get that, too. Spend any time in management and you have that constant pull of unblocking your team. Easiest way to punch through those barriers? Get everyone in a room, like it or not! 👿 So, let's see if we can agree on some things: 1) Meetings can be an inefficient use of people's time 2) Sometimes a good meeting can be the only time to get the right people to work something out 3) Being 'the remote person' on a meeting can be rough 4) There's just something magical about five people around a whiteboard with a pad of sticky notes... We're not getting away from meetings any time soon, but we can be better at them. Here's my checklist before I schedule a meeting that I've found can address some of the big problems: Right People? Are the right people included? The larger a meeting is, the more likely that attendees won't be active contributors and could probably just use a summary once you're done. Right Place? Are you able to fit everyone in your meeting around a table? Is someone presenting a screen or is there more value sitting face-to-face? At a previous hybrid workplace, we adopted a 'remote-first' meeting strategy. If ANYONE was remote, we were ALL remote. That led to a greater sense of inclusion by making sure to include everyone. Right Time? Don't schedule back-to-back meetings! Unless you exist in a quantum state, switching locations is never instantaneous. I prefer to schedule 20 or 50-minute meetings so that there's a solid 10 minutes of buffer. Don't squander it, either. TAKE A BREAK. Right Tools? I geek out on meeting tools. Whiteboards and sticky notes in person, Miro or FigJam on remote. Having the right tools promotes engagement and connection. When you are remote, turn on your camera and then turn off your self-view (the little preview window). Our cameras are how we show each other that we are listening. If you're not listening, maaaaaaaaybe you're in the wrong meeting... (see question 1) Right Meeting? Do we have a solid agenda? Should this even be a meeting at all? We have so many options for communication. Very often, simply talking through something is a great way forward. Just as often, though, a phone call or a good Slack conversation can suffice. Meeting might be our first impulse, but perhaps it's not always the best one. Do you need input from twelve people with wildly incompatible schedules? Probably needs to happen outside of the meeting room… It doesn’t matter if you hate meetings or love them. I hope this list gives you some tools to take the time to consider the people you are pulling in and make it the best meeting you can. How do you make the most of your meetings? Any other tips and tricks?

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#ImposterSyndrome. Anyone with any amount of time in the industry has experience with this. The longer you're in the industry, the more you've experienced it. It sucks. The most effective helper or resolver of imposter syndrome I've seen for inexperienced developers is to watch what really happens when a more tenured developer is working. Every. Horrible. Step.* Let them watch you get lost in the spaghetti of a many-decade's old codebase (or even code you, yourself wrote 6 months ago). Let them watch you Google the exact syntax for an iterator in that weird part of the language you never operate on - or in the language the "legacy" microservice that powers the entire company is written in. If you work in a language that uses an interpreter, let them watch you fumble with new ideas in the console interpreter. Let them watch you make sure that "if emptyArray:" really, really doesn't trigger that if-statement in Python. You've been writing in Python for 5 years and regularly use that exact format, but the code isn't working and you don't know why, so better check just to make sure, right? I know I've done it! Let them watch the code you write completely fail in front of you and how you handle it. Let them watch the moments you feel like you don't know anything at all. I have it on good authority that junior devs watching me flounder helped them realize we all go through the same issues as each other and the same things confuse each of us. A lot of the time the only thing that separates a junior from a senior or even beyond is experience. Experiencing the pain. Experiencing the flounder. Experiencing the undocumented code enough that you probably sometimes sorta remember what it might do. And the ones of you out here that feel like you're too experienced to still be having imposter syndrome? You could ask someone even more experienced than you and I'm sure they'd say the same thing. [ I wanted to write about a specific situation that made me think of what I've written here but this post is already long, so I'll write and release that one later 😊 ] #mentorship * Okay, maybe not every step, I don't need the junior dev seeing me go for a walk, or watching some amusing YouTube video while I reduce the stress a sufficiently hard problem has evoked in me.

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One of the key parts of this template is the "We will try this for..."

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This is a great blog entry on the "devaluation of frontend" development. https://lnkd.in/gDuGeh7n You should read it. A few passages that jumped out at me: "We often aren’t included at the beginning stages, where we could easily identify costly accessibility, performance, and user experience mistakes; we’re brought in at the end, when things have already been built and it’s too late to change anything significantly." - THIS - I had a job for awhile where I was treated as a fixer/styler in spite of 5+ years at that point as a professional developer working in both backend and frontend languages. It was like getting very skilled at UI work made folks skeptical of all of my backend and regular programming skills. That was in spite of having a math degree and starting my software engineering career as a python developer. Meanwhile, you wouldn't believe the skepticism that we encounter when trying to tell folks that there is a "right" way to build the frontend so that you don't have to go back and fix accessibility problems or cross device issues. Because frontend skills are so devalued, it is very common to just expect a backend engineer to do them regardless of whether they have ANY skill in that area. I've seen it happen many, many times that a person with sometimes LESS than entry level skills on the frontend are just assigned to build new frontend features or make a major UI update. I mean it is literally common for someone who could NOT get hired as a frontend developer to be assigned to build a major new frontend/UI update. To use the building analogy, it's like you suddenly decided your plumber installing your sinks and tubs should be able to handle the installation of windows, doors, shingles, trim and paint. And this bit (https://lnkd.in/gMdmebAj): "Writing CSS seems to be regarded much like taking notes in a meeting, complete with the implicit sexism and devaluation of the note taker’s importance in the room." Yes, this. And guess what? Bad HTML and CSS can eat up your time and resources just as surely as any other part of the codebase. But now that you are putting someone on it who doesn't have those skills, like a very expensive backend software engineer with more than a decade of experience, you may be taking many times longer to find and resolve the problem than if you had put someone on it who works with it every day, or that was actually an expert. I mean should you put someone on that UI bug who cost $60/hour and can fix it in 10 minutes or someone that costs $100/hour and can fix it in 6 hours to a week? I am NOT joking about those times. Expertise and skills in one area of the stack, does not magically jump over to others.

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Potentially inflammatory statement: tech debt should be impossible. People usually squint at me when I say this. "Uh. Isn't tech debt a fact of life in software?" they ask. Sadly, it is. But it shouldn't be. Tech debt to me means "things that weren't done right and really should be fixed as soon as possible, ideally in the next sprint or two." Things that can wait for later--until we need the code to be more fancy--aren't tech debt, they're DECISIONS. The code isn't architected to handle 1,000 requests per second? That's not tech debt if for the next 6 months your product only needs to handle 10 requests per second. On the other hand, if we just slapped some code together and, "We'll come back later to write the unit tests," THAT is tech debt. Here's a simple rubric: 1. If you think, "We really should come back in the next sprint or two to fix this," you're about to incur tech debt. STOP and just fix it now. Why? Because you'll never have time to fix it later. (You think you will but trust me, you won't. Just ask your boss if they're OK with you making no progress for a sprint or two to fix "tech debt" because you didn't do it right in the first place.) 2. If you think, "This is good enough for now, and I won't really worry about this code for the next 6 months or so," Congrats! You didn't introduce tech debt. Software is never perfect and perfect software never ships. Build it right based on what you need NOW and refactor later when required. Make tech debt obsolete. Your CFO (and your customers) will love you for it. How do YOU avoid tech debt? Leave a comment and let me know.

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User (highest mileage segment) feed-back at its finest :-)

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As a dedicated fan of PoolSuite FM, I've taken matters into my own hands. With no Android version available, I'm leveraging NativeScript to create my own. Follow my journey through this tutorial series and witness the progress firsthand! #PoolSuiteFM #AppDevelopment #NativeScript #Vuejs #AndroidDevelopment #WeekendProject

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Coding assessments are a two-way street - your candidates are vetting you, the employer. Is this somewhere they want to work? Candidates have very limited signal before entering your process. Would I enjoy working here? Would I be adequately challenged? Am I going to learn from the day-to-day of my work? Candidates start trying to answer these questions the minute they start your interview process. In light of that - it's amazing how many companies use out-of-box, textbook-style challenges and scare off candidates. These judgments aren't equally distributed, either. It's the best candidates with optionality that will drop off first. At Ropes, we use LLMs to generate unique case-study style assessments for your candidates. Startups have more pressing priorities than creating the perfect candidate challenge - that's why they rely on Ropes to have a best-in-class process without investing the time to craft it manually. If you're using a library take-home assignment or test in your recruiting process - we'd love to help! Just shoot me a message to get started.

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I envision a better alternative to Backstage: reusing an existing script and adding an intuitive interface. That's essentially what most people expect from a self-service portal for their software engineers — nothing more. #internaldeveloperportal #devex #developerexperience

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