Skills, stories, and software every dev should know - 123dev #38
Posted on October 13, 2021 • 3 minutes • 528 words
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Edutainment
I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained.
Walt Disney
What’s next?
I had a lightning talk for Devops Days Portland called “TikTalk” about innovation. Please go watch it because it was a lot of fun to make.
Innovation comes in different forms; there are sustaining innovations and disruptive innovations. Most companies need people who can help sustain their innovations. They need to be better, faster, and stronger than they were.
Disruptive innovations are the things that build new businesses—typically by destroying old ones. It can come from new technologies or new abilities. The difference between sustaining and disruptive innovations is in the customers.
Sustaining innovations will grow markets because they’ll meet the needs of ever demanding customers. It’ll grow because it’s finally good enough.
Disruptive innovations will create new customers because it will let non-consumers do something they couldn’t before. Maybe the old thing required special skills or they couldn’t do something in a certain setting. It’ll grow because the consumers are good enough.
If you want to learn more I suggest you read The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business and Seeing What’s Next: Using the Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change.
Links
Something I wish I understood earlier in my career was how influence at companies worked. I always thought the organization chart was the only way to have influence until I read this and realized the org chart has very little to do with actual influence.
The shadow org chart. Like every company, we have a… | by Henry Ward | Medium — henrysward.medium.com Like every company, we have a hierarchical org chart with me at the top. It looks something like this: I have long felt there is a shadow org chart, much like a shadow economy, where employees trade…
I agree with Shawn that there’s a lot of value in “distros” to help make decisions for developers and accelerate what users can build. I’m a big fan of services like Vercel—where this newsletter is currently hosted—and they can solve problems for a lot of apps and sites.
However, large apps are complex and specialization doesn’t always work. If specialized “distro” providers are going to grow they will either add features and become more complex, or somehow help customers avoid complexity and shift it onto the provider. I don’t have a lot of hope that complexity will be avoided.
Cloud Distros: and the Deployment Age of the Cloud ∊ swyx.io — www.swyx.io The next step in the evolution of the Cloud is specialized distros.
This article has some very good general purpose logging advice for applications written in any language. I like the advice that logs should be
- Descriptive
- Contextual
- Reactive
There’s also some good specifics in the article on how to set up logging in python. What formatters you should use and how to configure the logger.
How to log in Python like a PRO 🐍🌴 — blog.guilatrova.dev I’ll show you what good logging is with real-life examples. Most people don’t know what to log, so they end up creating just noise….