Ryan Kara

I think many people in the software industry make the mistake of viewing tech debt like a loan in deferral. They decide to add to their debt assuming there is no short term cost, but one day they will have to start paying it down (or declare bankruptcy with a huge rewrite). A more accurate analogy would compare your tech debt to credit card debt. You immediately start paying for this debt. The minimum payment would barely chip away at the interest accruing. You pay that cost in your project with every feature. The tech debt you add today makes the feature you add tomorrow more difficult. Every work item you take on without addressing the debt will be more difficult, and will likely add to the debt itself. With both analogies, a common end result is crippling debt that grinds your progress to a halt. However, the former analogy assumes that you are making quick progress, when that simply isn't the case. "The only way to go fast, is to go well." - Robert C. Martin

14

Welcome Mitwa Patel to join Seradex as a co-op Software Developer in the spring/summer of 2024. During her tenure, she'll be working on converting Crystal reports to Telerik reports and adding test cases to QA automated testing for Windows-based ERP application. The new redesign report will remove imperfections, improve usability, and Seradex branding. The new test cases will be integrated into TestComplete which will be triggered by Azure DevOps pipeline. This integration will significantly reduce our manual testing timeline and inform any bugs to the developers immediately after auto-build and auto-deployment are completed. #ReportConversion #DataVisualization #QAautomation #AzureDevOps #TestComplete #ContinuousDevelopment #ContinuousIntegration

22

3 Comments

You can't make anyone do anything they don't want to do. If you find yourself with a team that isn't shipping fast enough, you can't use tactics to "increase the sense of urgency". You need strategy. And that's a problem for the Engineering Manager, not the individual contributor. Certainly, allowing developers to be co-owners of a project is best practice, but that only works if it's actually true. That is, if a developer suggests a better way and you ignore it, or a VP 2 steps above shuts it down, then the team is going to learn very fast to keep their heads down. You need buy-in from leadership. In other words, if you fake it, your people aren't stupid. They may placate you, but they'll know. The gaming industry is still finding this out... And another nit. If a developer commits to a timeline that is unrealistic the first time, oh well, it happens. But if this keeps happening, then what are you as an Engineering Manager doing about it? Releases are often a point of resource contention. If you're running into situations where you can't release because of an individual bottleneck, it usually points to a process issue that you need to fix, instead of blaming devs for missing deadlines that are hard to predict.

1

Today, we’re publishing our biggest piece yet.   We partnered with Puzzle to write about the next generation of accounting tools.   Our CEOs, Alex Lee and Sasha Orloff, explain how AI can turn accounting from a repetitive chore into a major source of business intelligence.   They cover everything from decreasing costs to improving accuracy and enhancing customer support.   We also hear from Fouad Farhat of Soma Capital—an investor in both Truewind and Puzzle—about the current state of accounting, and where it’s headed.   📌Check out the full article here: https://lnkd.in/eUzvZjTm

22

Does anyone else remember sitting in class thinking, "Am I ever going to actually use this?" 🤦‍♂️ I still ask myself this weekly when reading blog posts, listening to podcasts, catching up on massive Slack threads, or diving into documentation and feature listings. I don't always use the info, but it feels great when a memory from six months ago suddenly becomes relevant. I always think of that original Jurassic Park Unix scene. This often happens when discussing DevOps and Serverless, where boundaries blur already. Trying to keep all of the AWS documentation in my head while discussing the design of new features and optimizations feels like a superhuman task. What are some things you wish you had remembered when solving an issue or problem? For me, we designed a Lambda function to fail purposefully instead of attempting to recover for efficiency. Unfortunately, the Lambda control plane self-throttles a function once a failure threshold is reached... slowing our processing to a crawl and forcing some quick code changes. 😅 #AWS #lambda #serverless #learninginpublic #hugops

13

1 Comment

There’s something for everyone in web development in here:

8

1 Comment

15 years ago I contributed 2 chapters to Clean Code(https://a.co/d/5guLEzq), both related to threading. A second edition is coming out, and it occurs to me that while I don't do much direct threaded/parallel programming anymore, many issues around parallel execution still occur in systems where the stack "takes care" of all those details. Here's a collection of recent examples. This is a draft of a personal blog. The second version will go on the Industrial Logic, Inc. website. The final version will likely be added as an update for the 2nd Edition of Clean Code. Comments welcome, enjoy! https://lnkd.in/gWCUkK6V

9

Hey folks, if you work with any type of API integrations, you gotta check out this live demo. It's going to be packed with real-world use cases from building AI agents to syncing CRMs, and tons of practical tips to level up your workflows. Happy building!

5

After a couple years of programming are under your belt, it’s likely you’ll fall into the trap of building for the future. Let me save you some grief: It’s a waste of time! This feels like a good thing to do, especially when dealing with technical debt from folks who didn’t build for the future. The reason you feel this is because of hindsight bias - you know for a fact that your job today would have been easier if whoever wrote this code thought through how it might be used or extended. However, consider the perspective of that original author. To them, there’s multiple possible futures, and no guarantee any of them will need additional sophistication. In fact, in most of them, the code will get discarded. By building for the future, you’re gambling on your additional effort eventually having a use. Doing this only makes sense when you’re sure about what the future holds, AND when the payoff from making the bet now is substantially higher than making it later. It gets worse - effort is spent on more than just writing the code. For example, writing unit tests for the extra functionality, or having a QA team validate it all before release. With the stakes that high, do you still want to roll the dice? Remember, if you weren’t spending your effort on this, you’d be spending it on something else that has a more qualified, immediate use. Thus, it’s almost always the smarter play to only build what you need today - tomorrow can wait.

26

8 Comments

Calling on my fellow workers, a topic close to my heart - building better workplaces! We'd love to hear from people to help steer what we build next 💡 Please have a look at our survey and let us know your thoughts!

8

3 Comments

Working on a specification for https://lnkd.in/g-pBfAQv. Then I can verify it with tests and https://blprnt.tech/. I'm reminded that wormwood is optimized for readable source code, not UX. There is very little syntax validation.

4

Let's 🎉 celebrate 🎉 the fact that AFLAC users have the ability to use passkeys to speed their logins, improving the user experience, and reducing their customer service costs. But I can't overlook this quote: "Passwords are still in place for users who are not ready to move to passkey, or as an alternate path if needed." In other words, users are still subject to the risks of shared secrets. The security needle hasn't been moved in a material way and phishing resistance hasn't been achieved. Progress is good, but let's not oversell the benefits of passkeys in deployments when we haven't removed the risk of shared secrets or weak account recovery mechanisms. What do you think?

32

10 Comments

After a third-of-a-century career as a software tester, I'm done. I'm hanging 'em up. I'm retiring. I'm 58 years old and therefore supposed to call this an "early" retirement. I'm not going to let the nominal age at which I can start drawing Social Security benefits define early-vs.-late, though, so I am not going to use that term. I have no grand retirement plans. My horizon is a couple-three months out - I have a few hobbies, and I'm going to install Jira at home and build a backlog of maintenance and improvement projects* with the intent of not being in a particular hurry to start executing. (*both "home" and "personal", if you follow me) You know what, though - this sounds like the first chapter of some kind of adventure novel. "How did I end up getting involved in <something you'd never think I'd do>," something along those lines. So I'll write it out loud here - I'm way past being the protagonist in a thriller story, but if you need someone to be, like, the guy on the other end of the phone who provides you the information or communication assistance so that *you* can undertake the dangerous and exciting adventure, hey, call me up. A career in software testing leaves me with no special adventuring skills or important influential connections, or anything like that, but at least I'll have some spare time, the need for which, in my opinion, isn't emphasized enough in the description of supporting characters in novels and movies.

92

15 Comments

As I'm getting back into #Angular, I'm remembering how much my brain has trouble working with RxJS Streams. But, it just occurred to me, I don't actually have to use their HttpClient module—I can use my own fetch client. All I want is Promises and AbortControllers. This is not a slight against RxJS—I know that many people are intensely in love with it. But my brain just can't deal. Resolves and rejections for HTTP requests, that's what my brain can understand. RxJS feels like more abstraction than I can handle. Maybe it has something to do with my Aphantasia.

5

6 Comments

Some takeaways for a Jeff Hinton interview with timeless insights. My POV as an app builder is that models are now being improved for better UX (faster response/multi-modal) and reasoning capability and cost continues to improve. The technology headroom remains strong, and the integration of LLM into all software experience will continue and expansion of the reach (invasion) of software + intelligence will also continue. - Next word prediction is not merely parroting of training data. To do next word prediction well, LLM needs and already exhibits strong reasoning behavior. This would continue to scale / improve with more data / training. - LLM is a compression of human knowledge. The compression mechanism is identifying similar concepts across domains and reduces duplications among them. This can also be a source of "creativity" as LLM "sees" correlations of seemingly unrelated ideas through this compression. LLM can be more creative as it sees similiarity / correlations across all domains beyond (human) convetional wisdom. - LLM can exceed the quality of its training data. Jeff gave an example of an experiment where a model trained on 50% intentionally incorrectly labeled data, can still perform at 90+% accuracy after training. - Multi-modal models can improve the overall world understanding and lead to better overall reasoning. It does not even need to generate multi-modal output. - Not ML specific, but an interesting life insights. Bad intuition comes from believing (or wanting to believe) everything you are told. It diminishes the ability to make a clear choice that would lead to differentiated success (or failure).

4

ruby-lsp is a solid extension to use with vscode. I spent some time today with it debugging a couple of complex issues and I was able to dig deep into our dependency tree easily without having to manually search for things. Definitely give it a shot if you're using #ruby #rubyonrails.

1

🚀 Tired of flying blind when it comes to company spending? I’ve got great news! Airbase just launched spend analytics to give you high-definition on-demand visibility into company spend. You’ll see spend by vendor, department, subsidiary, project, and more to surface savings opportunities and areas for process improvement. Make smarter decisions faster with better analytics. We’ve also enhanced our Vendor Management capabilities to build better relationships with vendors. DM me if you’d like to learn more. 📊

11

1 Comment