Software Crafts Podcast

Marijn is the guest of this episode, and he brings his heuristic: Do NOT rewrite from scratch if it is in production (https://marijn.huizendveld.com/design-heuristics/do-not-rewrite-from-scratch-if-it-is-in-production). He gives examples of how to evolve software in production, reducing the risk of building the same thing in a new tech stack. We discuss how the software evolution is connected to the business model of an company, and seems a technical design, can even impact the revenue model.

Marijn recommends the following resources:

As a consultant, Marijn Huizendveld (@huizendveld) helps scale-ups in Europe apply Domain-Driven Design.

Our guest for this episode is Charity Majors. The pattern that serves as the stage for the episode is “Build Confidence” from the Object-Oriented Reengineering Patterns (http://scg.unibe.ch/download/oorp/OORP.pdf). Charity describes the infamous “death spiral”, where folks that produce code lack confidence in their processes and practices to deploy code to production. According to Charity, our job is not done until we close the feedback loop!

Charity also gives excellent advice regarding patterns and heuristics: to understand a pattern or heuristic, take one that you see working, and modify it. Learn what comes out of that!

Charity recommends:

Charity Majors (@mipsytipsy) is the co-founder and CTO of honeycomb.io, the original observability company.

In this episode, we host Marco Heimeshoff. The interview starts with the heuristic “Optimise for future potential” from the DDD Heuristics repository (https://www.dddheuristics.com/design-heuristics/optimise-for-future-potential/). Marco will take us through the journey of optimising for future potential, where he explains the need for boundaries as an enabler to optimise different parts of a system. We explore the idea of discovering boundaries and how semantics plays a crucial role in the discovery process.

Marco recommends:

Marco Heimeshoff (@Heimeshoff) is a trainer, speaker and software developer from Germany. He organizes KanDDDinsky, a conference about Domain-Driven Design and the art of business software and co-founded the german DDD community in 2013 and VirtualDDD.com in 2019. Between consulting companies around the globe and building health care software, you'll find him speaking at conferences about DDD, socio-technical systems and first principles.

With over a decade of experience, he is helping teams to change and learn in all things from code to culture and to master Domain-Driven Design, agile software development, functional programming and CQRS with event sourcing.

In this week's episode, we host Alayshia Knighten. She is challenged with the “Manage inertia” pattern from the Simon Wardley Cotrine repository (https://wardleypedia.org/mediawiki/index.php/Doctrine_Patterns#Manage_inertia). She shares how she manages expectations to manage inertia with their customers. For that time is needed! During our conversation, we discuss how we learn and what can we do to influence others to learn.

Alayshia recommends:

Alayshia is an Onboarding Engineering manager at Honeycomb who specializes in Observability and Production Excellence. She is also a modern-day hippie that simply enjoys getting "ish" done while "buzzing" around with customers, transforming their DevOps world.

This week in the podcast, we feature Danyel Fisher. He brought the heuristic “Users are correct but not accurate” from his repository. As a starter, Danyel explains that users have goals that aren’t able to express well, and we need to use different methods to discover the needs. We discuss what makes a high performing team, and in his opinion, one of the distinctive factors is the usage of mixed methods for problem examination! And, he gave us a new heuristic to battle personal bias: “Delight and being wrong”!

Danyel recommends:

Danyel Fisher (@FisherDanyel) is a User Data Expert for Honeycomb.io. He focuses his passion for data visualisation on helping SREs understand their complex systems quickly and clearly. Before he started at Honeycomb, he spent thirteen years at Microsoft Research, studying ways to help people gain insights faster from big data analytics.

Episode 58 is out. A long journey, and today with us, we have Phillip Carter. Phillip brings a heuristic from his repository: “Focusing on developer experience can make your products more powerful and your teams more empowered”. We deep dive into what is developer experience and how some companies don’t get it right. For example, developer experience is different from the software development lifecycle. He also gives excellent advice on how to start developer experience initiatives within the company and leverage the economics of scale.

Phillip recommends:

Phillip Carter (@_cartermp) is a Product Manager at Honeycomb, focusing on Developer Experience.

In this episode, we interview Heidi Helfand. She is challenged with the “Think aptitude and attitude” pattern from the Wardley Maps Doctrine repository (https://wardleypedia.org/mediawiki/index.php/Doctrine_Patterns#Think_aptitude_and_attitude). During the episode, Heidi shares her experiences in a learning environment and how it can be set up to allow emergence (doing it together). We also discuss how to harvest the potential by engaging people in problem-solving while allowing for variation.

Heidi recommends the following resources:

Heidi Helfand (@heidihelfand) is the author of the book Dynamic Reteaming and Vice President of Engineering at Kin Insurance.

We host Jessica Kerr for this episode. She is challenged with the heuristic “Commit to the direction, be adaptive along the path” from the Simon Wardley Doctrine repository (https://wardleypedia.org/mediawiki/index.php/Doctrine_Patterns#Commit_to_the_direction.2C_be_adaptive_along_the_path). She explains her own heuristic, “Having a quest” since often we are wrong about the path! The episode is a gold mine on heuristics, and there are a few more.

Jessica recommends the following resources:

• Learn Wardley Map (https://learnwardleymapping.com/)
• Honeycomb (https://www.honeycomb.io/)
• Introduction To Observability (https://www.honeycomb.io/obs101/)
• Obliquity by John Kay
• Games: Agency As Art by C. Thi Nguyen 

Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) is a developer advocate, software developer and symmathecist with 20+ years of experience. She has worked in enterprises and startups, in Java, Scala, Clojure, Ruby, and TypeScript. Talk to her about technical details, or about how to get software to teach us about its needs.

Abby recommends:

• Walking Skeleton: https://gojko.net/2014/06/09/forget-the-walking-skeleton-put-it-on-crutches/
• Pragmatic engineer newsletter: http://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/
• Quality coaching: https://www.annemariecharrett.com/tag/book/
• Hello stay sassy: https://stay-saasy-signup.ck.page/1cc4343737

Abby (@a_bangser) has ten years in the industry. Over half of this time as a tester, but the last bit was mainly in systems, platform and infrastructure testing, which led quickly into SRE. You can find her at a conference near you speaking about some of these topics!

Matt Lawrence is our guest, and he is challenged with the biggest heuristic so far: “Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.”, also known as “Jakob’s Law”. The heuristic is part of the “Jakob Nielsen Usability Heuristics” and can be found here: https://lawsofux.com/jakobs-law/.

Matt shares his experiences when it comes to usability, and what challenges you are faced when the system users are attached to a website. We discussed the different techniques that are valid to fulfil the user's needs when it comes to usability.

Matt recommends:

• UX Podcast - https://uxpodcast.com/
• UX Podcast Episode #235 - https://uxpodcast.com/235-internet-anxiety-david-swallow/
• Twitter as a source of knowledge
• W3 Schools - https://www.w3schools.com/
• CSS Tricks - https://css-tricks.com/

Matt Lawrence (LinkedIn) is the co-founder of Digital Dynasty Design in Canada.