12 Signs You’re Working in a Feature Factory

Are you constantly shipping features and cutting corners? Then you might be working at a Feature Factory. Here are 12 symptoms: No measurement of impact. Rapid shuffling of teams and projects. Success theater around “shipping”. Infrequent (acknowledged) failures and scrapped work. No connection to core metrics. No PM retrospectives. Obsessing about prioritization. No tweaking. Culture …

Good Code Reviews, Better Code Reviews

Gergely Orosz: Plenty of people and organizations have shared their code review best practices and what the definition of good code reviews mean to them. Below is my personal take on what good code reviews look like and what great ones – better than good – are. Some very good tips! In my own personal …

The (fictitious) adventure of learning the next big framework

Installing all the things! On learning a new framework, and having to install a gazillion things for starters, and then eventually seeing it not work at all: I just want to write a bit of code and make a simple app,” Roger thought. It shouldn’t be this hard. Still, he didn’t quit. He cut and …

Why a software patch is called a patch

Software Bugs A common misconception is that a software bug is called a bug because of an actual bug that was once found. The story goes that Grace Hopper found a moth stuck in Harvard University’s Mark II calculator in 1947 and that she taped it inside a logbook with the words “First actual case …

Mailtrap.io – Fake SMTP testing server

var transport = nodemailer.createTransport({ host: ‘mailtrap.io’, port: 2525, auth: { user: ‘your-mailtrap-inbox-username’, pass: ‘your-mailtrap-inbox-pass’ } }); transport.sendMail({ … }); Mailtrap is a fake SMTP server for development teams to test, view and share emails sent from the development and staging environments without spamming real customers. Now this is great for testing: use mailtrap’s SMTP server …

Hype Driven Development

Software development teams often make decisions about software architecture or technological stack based on inaccurate opinions, social media, and in general on what is considered to be “hot”, rather than solid research and any serious consideration of expected impact on their projects. I call this trend Hype Driven Development, perceive it harmful and advocate for …

Does code need to be perfect?

Andreas Creten, founder of Made With Love, on different needs in code quality depending on what type of product (POC, MVP, …) you are making. Until your MVP really gets traction you can run on shitty code or even do things manually to prove you have a product/market fit. Only once you nail it and …