DEV Community: Sebastian Vargr

Aha! I discovered Conway's law

Sebastian Vargr — Wed, 21 Oct 2020 11:47:55 +0000

Intro

A friend of mine introduced me to the concept of Conway's law, and it triggered a classic aha! moment for me, so now I am looking for more opinions to challenge my psyched bias.

So let's share experiences. :)

If you do not know Conway's law, here is the gist of it grabbed from Wikipedia.

Conway's law is an adage stating that organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structure.

Story

I've been learning to be a team/tech lead the past year and I have struggled with it since at my core I am a web application architect, I solve code problems, not organization problems.

I feel Conway's law is a really good new perspective for me.
Not to blame' everyone else, but as a tool to recognize when communication breaks down and how it reflects on the code/architecture.

Fx. some features got implemented really badly, how did that come about? What part of the decision making failed.

It's easy to blame developers for fx. not testing enough, but I find often bad code happens when developers are not working the same way, have decent specs, or when they are working too many domains at once.

I've been fretting about teaching my colleagues/juniors how to use the tools we have efficiently, but maybe what I should have been doing is limiting the domain that we work with to make sure we get good at one thing at a time.

This is definitely something I will try and apply in the future as well as looking at previous problems through this lens.

What are your thoughts on Conway's law?

What are your experiences with Conway's law?
How have you used it, or seen it applied?
And do you have any advice on how to apply it from a team/tech lead perspective?

let's discuss it! :)

Keep your eye on the birdie!
Vargr

"I'll be emailing you weekly" - Yeah, no, stop.

Sebastian Vargr — Fri, 10 Jul 2020 20:50:20 +0000

I got this e-mail title "I'll be emailing you weekly" today from dev.to,

This actually hit a nerve.

No you do not get to email me another weekly without me asking.
This email prompted me to disable the weekly's...

Anyone else got annoyed by this?

Also, and this might be subjective, but i feel like the amount of email CTA's have been increasing during my year on the site, anyone else noticed this?

I hope this finds the right audience.

Coding to relax from obligations

Sebastian Vargr — Wed, 27 May 2020 14:50:25 +0000

Going through a stressfull period at work at the moment.
Finally got a chance to code without interruptions this afternoon.

It was pure bliss, just me, the problems in front me, and the ecstatic feeling of flow.

I am considering asking my manager to have a "vacation" from my team/teck lead role to rest up a bit, might even be a good opportunity for me to train a standin for when i am on vacation etc.

Anyone else have similar experiences?

Ignoring performance

Sebastian Vargr — Sun, 08 Mar 2020 18:26:46 +0000

I see a pattern where developers ignore performance if it is not seen as an eminent problem.

Examples of this could be ignoring components re-rendering excessively because it's not a real performance problem yet for the targets user, accepting that derived state is calculated unnecessary, having cookies/headers on requests that have no need for them etc.

From a business perspective this makes good sense.
There are usually better business gains elsewhere.

I also do this myself at work.

But 10+ browser tabs with these kinda of shenanigans going in them + other applications add up.

Especially when we start to consider mobile devices.

That leaves me wondering..

Isn't this kinda of lying to our selves by only looking at best case scenarios?
When does this become too puristic?
How could we mitigate this in a way that makes sense business wise?

Edit, extra question.

How would we measure if this is a problem for users in a none-intrusive way?

Git jokes, giv em here!

Sebastian Vargr — Fri, 03 Jan 2020 21:27:22 +0000

It occurred to me that there is good material in git for jokes.

So I’ve decided to git good and commit to pushing this thread until it becomes the base for my repository of bad puns.

So share with me your stash of unstaged jokes will you?

I promise I won’t be cherry-picky!