What it’s like to ship products - 123dev #29

Posted on October 4, 2021 • 3 minutes • 555 words

A surfer gets tossed like a rag doll from a large wave

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An industry secret

For 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 of different methods to get their products to market.

I’ve been a part of some large product launches and plenty of incremental changes in various environments. As soon as the product launch requires coordinating with a non-development team (e.g. blog post or press release) they all had some form of a slack channel, email list, or phone bridge where someone was in charge of manually going down a spreadsheet and clicking buttons.

This is fine. Not everything has to be automated. You’re not doing it wrong. Sometimes the right thing to do is manually get acknowledgements from all stakeholders and click a button.

Dev environment as code

I saw a lot of interest in remote coding setups and products this past week. Everything from GitHub Workspaces, gitpod, and a bunch of others I had never heard of. I don’t think the products or industry are quite ready for a shift here, but I do think it’s close to becoming a reality.

Many of the products want to solve every problem. Some want to own the entire stack. The one that wins will probably have the lowest barrier to entry—fewest required changes—and it’ll be free. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see splintering on which products to use based on programming languages or tool chains.

Links

This was the best and worst thing I read all week. It was the best because it accurately described successes I’ve seen at companies in my career. It was the worst because it accurately described failures and inability to change I’ve seen too.

It was a bit wordy and the graphs didn’t always help, but the four stages are spot on.

If You Want To Transform IT, Start With Finance – zwischenzugs — zwischenzugs.com tl;dr - ‘Money Flows Rule Everything Around Me’ When talking about IT transformation, we often we often talk about ‘culture’ being the problem in making change, but why stop there? If we take a ‘5 whys’ approach, then we should go deeper. So, where can we go from ‘culture’? Here I suggest we should consider…

This is a massive list of free programming books. Many of the books are older (2+ years) but still a ton of amazing content if you’re looking to learn something new and you learn well from reading books.

GitHub - EbookFoundation/free-programming-books: Freely available programming books :books: Freely available programming books. Contribute to EbookFoundation/free-programming-books development by creating an account on GitHub.

Along with programming books there’s often a lot of gaps in knowledge in how to design systems. Common patterns, how to scale specific components, and how to pass interview questions are all covered in this link. My only complaint is it uses transparent images and I had to turn off GitHub dark theme.

GitHub - donnemartin/system-design-primer: Learn how to design large-scale systems. Prep for the system design interview. Includes Anki flashcards. Learn how to design large-scale systems. Prep for the system design interview. Includes Anki flashcards. - GitHub - donnemartin/system-design-primer: Learn how to design large-scale systems. Prep for the system design interview. Includes Anki flashcards.