Skills, stories, and software every dev should know
By Justin Garrison
1 gif, 2 comments, and 3 links to make you a better developer and person
issues
123dev #43: Skills, stories, and software every dev should know
The continuous issue
123dev #42: Skills, stories, and software every dev should know
MotivationIt is easier to educate a do-er than to motivate the educatedMy experience at companies in various jobs and in open source communities echos this quote. I have had the privilege to work with some very smart people. If given the chance when starting …
123dev #41: Skills, stories, and software every dev should know
BGPI heard the GIF came from what happened when Facebook ran the following command.ip link set fb0 downThankfully they were able to fix it withsudo reboot
123dev #40: Skills, stories, and software every dev should know
Laying a trap for yourselfI have lost track of how many times I’ve patched a bug only to have it come back and hit me in the head. Sometimes tests will help you avoid a self-made trap, but more often then not I’ll just push harder until it breaks.Thorough cod…
123dev #39: Skills, stories, and software every dev should know
I twice had lunch with Ed Catmull at Disney and I asked him if there was anything that surprised him about managing people. He said he was surprised how well people can game rules and metrics for their own benefit.The above gif may or may not be real, but als…
123dev #38: Skills, stories, and software every dev should know
EdutainmentI would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained.Walt Disney
123dev #37: Exponential growth and shipping
Shipping productsThis past week I was part of the team that launched EKS Anywhere. Launching an open source project was something I really wanted to do to see how it was different from products and services I’ve helped launch in the past.The biggest differenc…
123dev #36: Tools and workflows
Tools you’re familiar withThe right tool for the job isn’t always the best tool. Some tools are made for a specific reason, but there is a learning curve and cognitive tax to know how to use new tools. Sometimes the right tool is the one that is good enough t…
123dev #35: Mental health is health
StressAs a junior developer you get assigned work and have to implement it and solve problems within a certain scope. As you get more senior you have more responsibility which often comes with more visibility and more pressure. Sometimes you’re a blocker for …
123dev #34: The importance of docs
PuzzlingGrowing up my dad loved puzzles. He had the weirdest rule that I never understood.No matter how many pieces the puzzle had, he would look at the picture once when he opened it and never looked at it again. Thankfully, he never enforced that rule on us…
123dev #33: Climbing the corporate ladder
Stealing The Corner OfficeI listened to this book and here are the action items to help you climb the career ladder into senior leadership if that’s what you want. It’s not the best strategies for a dev/IC, but some of the tips are still helpful. If you can f…
123dev #32: Please stop building custom CD tools
Your build tools are great, but no one wants to learn themI’ve never worked somewhere that had a completely off-the-shelf CI/CD system. In some cases the systems are just minor tweaks or wrapper scripts over common tools (usually Jenkins). In extreme cases it…
123dev #31: No code mo problems
Cher AmiCher Ami was a messenger pigeon used by the American army in France during WWI. A battalion of 550 troops was surrounded by the German army and the allies thought they were in a different location. The Major was trying to send out messages for help, b…
123dev #30: Resiliency and new domains
ResiliencyCode and systems break all the time. At a certain scale it’s important that your start building software that can heal itself. It’s sometimes confusing what that means because what state should the software return to?While it was bent out of shape t…
123dev #29: What it’s like to ship products
An industry secretFor all the automation the technology industry prides itself in there’s still a lot of it that’s manual. Some companies get up on stage and talk about how great their automatic canary deployments are, how they use feature flags, or a variety…
123dev #28: Working faster not harder
Code generatorsLots of people recommend learning to program by starting with fundamentals. Learn the basic language patterns and elements and work your way up to frameworks. You’ll have a stronger understanding of how things work.I don’t think this is good ad…
123dev #27: Be kind and AWS Infinidash 🌩️
Silent storiesThe ability to educate with stories is something humans are very good at. Videos are just a new(ish) medium for telling stories. One of the reasons I love gifs is they’re videos with restrictions. The restrictions limit the types of stories we c…
123dev #26: Reliability is the most important feature
Simplicity vs User ExperienceWhy do fans have that weird nob to turn on oscillation but they have buttons for speed control? Why not put an oscillation button on the front? The nob is hard to reach and especially difficult while the fan is oscillating. It’s t…
123dev #25: Integration Test Email #25
Who’s to blame?Many of us probably heard about the HBOMax email that was sent out by mistake last week. It wasn’t a major outage, but a lot of people were talking about it. I especially loved the outpouring of support I saw online for whomever triggered the i…
123dev #24: Declarative and imperative
Declarative and imperativeOftentimes in technology we say declarative things are better than imperative. Why write a script when you can create an abstraction? In reality there’s no such thing as something being completely declarative outside maybe binary dat…