Software Crafts Podcast

Marijn is the guest of this episode, and he brings his heuristic: Do NOT rewrite from scratch if it is in production (https://marijn.huizendveld.com/design-heuristics/do-not-rewrite-from-scratch-if-it-is-in-production). He gives examples of how to evolve software in production, reducing the risk of building the same thing in a new tech stack. We discuss how the software evolution is connected to the business model of an company, and seems a technical design, can even impact the revenue model. Marijn recommends the following resources: https://www.eventstorming.com/: Learn more about EventStorming, which is a great way to talk with people outside of tech Introducing EventStorming by Alberto Brandolini - https://leanpub.com/introducing_eventstorming Crossing the River by Feeling the Stones • Simon Wardley • GOTO 2018 A different take on (context) mapping - Marijn Huizendveld - DDD Europe 2020 Marijn Huizendveld How to relate your OKRs to your technical real-estate - Marijn Huizendveld http://hintjens.com/blog:94: Ten rules for Good API Design by Peter Hintjens https://marijn.huizendveld.com: Learn more about Marijn, and his perspective on software design As a consultant, Marijn Huizendveld (@huizendveld) helps scale-ups in Europe apply Domain-Driven Design.

Our guest for this episode is Charity Majors. The pattern that serves as the stage for the episode is “Build Confidence” from the Object-Oriented Reengineering Patterns (http://scg.unibe.ch/download/oorp/OORP.pdf). Charity describes the infamous “death spiral”, where folks that produce code lack confidence in their processes and practices to deploy code to production. According to Charity, our job is not done until we close the feedback loop! Charity also gives excellent advice regarding patterns and heuristics: to understand a pattern or heuristic, take one that you see working, and modify it. Learn what comes out of that! Charity recommends: Honeycomb blog - https://www.honeycomb.io/blog Charity Majors blog - https://charity.wtf/ Raw Signal newsletter - https://www.rawsignal.ca/newsletter Liz Fong-Jones Twitter - https://twitter.com/lizthegrey Jessica Kerr Twitter - https://twitter.com/jessitron Charity Majors (@mipsytipsy) is the co-founder and CTO of honeycomb.io, the original observability company.

In this episode, we host Marco Heimeshoff. The interview starts with the heuristic “Optimise for future potential” from the DDD Heuristics repository (https://www.dddheuristics.com/design-heuristics/optimise-for-future-potential/). Marco will take us through the journey of optimising for future potential, where he explains the need for boundaries as an enabler to optimise different parts of a system. We explore the idea of discovering boundaries and how semantics plays a crucial role in the discovery process. Marco recommends: VirtualDDD.com DDD Crew @ GitHub - https://github.com/ddd-crew Domain Modeling Made Functional: Pragmatic Programmers: Tackle Software Complexity with Domain-Driven Design and F# by Scott Wlaschin KanDDDinsky conference - https://kandddinsky.de/ Marco Heimeshoff (@Heimeshoff) is a trainer, speaker and software developer from Germany. He organizes KanDDDinsky, a conference about Domain-Driven Design and the art of business software and co-founded the german DDD community in 2013 and VirtualDDD.com in 2019. Between consulting companies around the globe and building health care software, you'll find him speaking at conferences about DDD, socio-technical systems and first principles. With over a decade of experience, he is helping teams to change and learn in all things from code to culture and to master Domain-Driven Design, agile software development, functional programming and CQRS with event sourcing.

In this week's episode, we host Alayshia Knighten. She is challenged with the “Manage inertia” pattern from the Simon Wardley Cotrine repository (https://wardleypedia.org/mediawiki/index.php/Doctrine_Patterns#Manage_inertia). She shares how she manages expectations to manage inertia with their customers. For that time is needed! During our conversation, we discuss how we learn and what can we do to influence others to learn. Alayshia recommends: Charity Majors blog (https://charity.wtf/) Invitation to Anthropology by Luke Eric Lassiter If you want to learn something, start to do experiments by yourself! Alayshia is an Onboarding Engineering manager at Honeycomb who specializes in Observability and Production Excellence. She is also a modern-day hippie that simply enjoys getting "ish" done while "buzzing" around with customers, transforming their DevOps world.

This week in the podcast, we feature Danyel Fisher. He brought the heuristic “Users are correct but not accurate” from his repository. As a starter, Danyel explains that users have goals that aren’t able to express well, and we need to use different methods to discover the needs. We discuss what makes a high performing team, and in his opinion, one of the distinctive factors is the usage of mixed methods for problem examination! And, he gave us a new heuristic to battle personal bias: “Delight and being wrong”! Danyel recommends: Signal: Understanding What Matters in a World of Noise by Stephen Few Making Data Visual: A Practical Guide to Using Visualization for Insight by Danyel Fisher and Miriah Meyer Danyel Fisher (@FisherDanyel) is a User Data Expert for Honeycomb.io. He focuses his passion for data visualisation on helping SREs understand their complex systems quickly and clearly. Before he started at Honeycomb, he spent thirteen years at Microsoft Research, studying ways to help people gain insights faster from big data analytics.

Episode 58 is out. A long journey, and today with us, we have Phillip Carter. Phillip brings a heuristic from his repository: “Focusing on developer experience can make your products more powerful and your teams more empowered”. We deep dive into what is developer experience and how some companies don’t get it right. For example, developer experience is different from the software development lifecycle. He also gives excellent advice on how to start developer experience initiatives within the company and leverage the economics of scale. Phillip recommends: The case for developer experience by Jean Yang ( https://future.a16z.com/the-case-for-developer-experience/) Building for 99% developers by Jean Yang (https://future.a16z.com/software-development-building-for-99-developers/ ) Gitpod (https://www.gitpod.io/) GitHub Codespaces (https://github.com/features/codespaces) Sourcegraph (https://about.sourcegraph.com/) Phillip Carter (@_cartermp) is a Product Manager at Honeycomb, focusing on Developer Experience.

In this episode, we interview Heidi Helfand. She is challenged with the “Think aptitude and attitude” pattern from the Wardley Maps Doctrine repository (https://wardleypedia.org/mediawiki/index.php/Doctrine_Patterns#Think_aptitude_and_attitude). During the episode, Heidi shares her experiences in a learning environment and how it can be set up to allow emergence (doing it together). We also discuss how to harvest the potential by engaging people in problem-solving while allowing for variation. Heidi recommends the following resources: The First 90 Days by Michael D. Watkins Leadership Is Language by David Marquet The Leader Lab by LeeAnn Renninger and Tania Luna Heidi Helfand (@heidihelfand) is the author of the book Dynamic Reteaming and Vice President of Engineering at Kin Insurance.

We host Jessica Kerr for this episode. She is challenged with the heuristic “Commit to the direction, be adaptive along the path” from the Simon Wardley Doctrine repository (https://wardleypedia.org/mediawiki/index.php/Doctrine_Patterns#Commit_to_the_direction.2C_be_adaptive_along_the_path). She explains her own heuristic, “Having a quest” since often we are wrong about the path! The episode is a gold mine on heuristics, and there are a few more.   Jessica recommends the following resources: Learn Wardley Map (https://learnwardleymapping.com/) Honeycomb (https://www.honeycomb.io/) Introduction To Observability (https://www.honeycomb.io/obs101/) Obliquity by John Kay Games: Agency As Art by C. Thi Nguyen  Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) is a developer advocate, software developer and symmathecist with 20+ years of experience. She has worked in enterprises and startups, in Java, Scala, Clojure, Ruby, and TypeScript. Talk to her about technical details, or about how to get software to teach us about its needs.

In this episode, we host Abby Bangser. She is challenged with the heuristic “Timebox the unknown” from the Xebia Essentials repository (https://essentials.xebia.com/timebox/). She shared a recent real-life example of how timeboxing can narrow the problem space towards a solution which can be helpful from day one. During our conversation, she shared some of her heuristics used daily. Abby recommends: Walking Skeleton: https://gojko.net/2014/06/09/forget-the-walking-skeleton-put-it-on-crutches/ Pragmatic engineer newsletter: http://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/ Quality coaching: https://www.annemariecharrett.com/tag/book/ Hello stay sassy: https://stay-saasy-signup.ck.page/1cc4343737 Abby (@a_bangser) has ten years in the industry. Over half of this time as a tester, but the last bit was mainly in systems, platform and infrastructure testing, which led quickly into SRE. You can find her at a conference near you speaking about some of these topics!

Matt Lawrence is our guest, and he is challenged with the biggest heuristic so far: “Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.”, also known as “Jakob’s Law”. The heuristic is part of the “Jakob Nielsen Usability Heuristics” and can be found here: https://lawsofux.com/jakobs-law/.   Matt shares his experiences when it comes to usability, and what challenges you are faced when the system users are attached to a website. We discussed the different techniques that are valid to fulfil the user's needs when it comes to usability.   Matt recommends: UX Podcast - https://uxpodcast.com/ UX Podcast Episode #235 - https://uxpodcast.com/235-internet-anxiety-david-swallow/ Twitter as a source of knowledge W3 Schools - https://www.w3schools.com/ CSS Tricks - https://css-tricks.com/ Matt Lawrence (LinkedIn) is the co-founder of Digital Dynasty Design in Canada.

Mathias Verraes is the guest of this episode, and for the first time, we have more than one heuristic! Mathias brings three Loss Aversion heuristics from his personal repository. When we make decisions, we often do not explore options that have a risk of loss, even if that loss is balanced out by potential gains. These heuristics help you overcome that bias. We jump right into the rabbit hole, and Mathias brings the intersection of software engineering, psychology, and anthropology to exemplify the heuristics. During the interview, he shares techniques and practices that are part of his toolbox when working on software strategy and design.   Mathias recommends: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef You Are Not So Smart - https://youarenotsosmart.com/ The “It's Just Like...” Heuristic - https://verraes.net/2021/05/its-just-like-heuristic/ Exaptation & managed serendipity - https://thecynefin.co/exaptation-managed-serendipity-part-i/ Domain-Driven Design Europe conference - https://dddeurope.com/ Mathias Verraes (@mathiasverraes) is the founder and consultant at Aardling and organiser of the Domain-Driven Design Europe conference.  

We are back with a new episode featuring Emily Bache. We start with a heuristic close to her work, “Working software is not enough, we need well-crafted software”. Emily shares her view on how code quality is essential, not only for the code maintainability but also to onboard new people on the team, increasing productivity. The interview flows towards team culture and management; she shares her experiences about how friction can arise in a team that produces software with no shared values and rituals that trickle down to code. She explains how all of those decisions and misalignments contribute to the complexity of the codebase. Emily recommends the following resources: Samman Technical Coaching - https://sammancoaching.org/ Approval Tests - https://approvaltests.com/ Text Test - https://www.texttest.org/ Dig Deep Roots Newsletter - https://www.digdeeproots.com/articles/on/legacy/ Emily (@emilybache) is a Technical Agile Coach with ProAgile. She is the author of "Technical Agile Coaching with the Samman method", a maintainer of Gilded Rose Refactoring Kata and other exercises and a frequent conference speaker.

In this episode, Anand Safi is our guest. Anand is challenged with the “Most Valuable First” pattern from the Object-Oriented Reengineering Patterns repository (http://scg.unibe.ch/download/oorp/OORP.pdf). He starts to analyse value based on the different zoom levels: organisation, team and individuals. Anand explains the high degree of variance that the concept of value has. We end up discussing feedback cycles, psychology safety and OKR’s frameworks, and how all of it is connected. Anand suggests to follow: Marty Cagan Esther Derby Simon Sinek Anand (@anandsafi) is an Engineering Leader for Mark43 - a public safety software company. Over the past decade, Anand has progressed from starting as an aspiring engineer to becoming an engineering leader. Anand also is a Startup Advisor, Volunteer Board Member and an established tech mentor/ coach outside of his role. He loves reading about engineering culture, team dynamics and new advancements in tech.

Jason Rosoff is the guest of this episode. We start the interview with the pattern “Personalized relationships for co-creation” from the Cloud Native Transformations repository (https://www.cnpatterns.org/organization-culture/personalized-relationships-for-co-creation). Jason explains the difference between a complex and complicated problem and how psychological safety plays an essential role in innovation. He shares some examples of how some companies constraint the physical environment of their offices to create space for people to talk and share their ideas. During the interview, Jason explains how relationships can play an essential role for information to travel across a network, how organisations can enable it, and how managers and executives can read weak signals latent in their organisations. Jason recommends the following resources: Radical Candor from Kim Scott Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter from Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown “You are not so smart” podcast (https://youarenotsosmart.com/podcast/)  Jason Rosoff (@jasonrr) has a passion for building products and teams that scale. He believes teaching people to be better leaders is at the core of building anything great. As co-founder and CEO of Radical Candor, LLC, Jason helps teams at companies large and small build the best relationships of their careers and achieve amazing results. Prior to Radical Candor, Jason spent seven years scaling Khan Academy from four people to hundreds as both chief people officer and chief product officer. Working in partnership with The Gates Foundation and Google, he helped Khan Academy improve educational outcomes for more than 100-million students and teachers worldwide. Previously, Jason was a product leader at Fog Creek where he helped build the teams that created StackOverflow and Trello. Early in his career, Jason led engineering operations at a white-label producer of photo books for Apple. He earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in management from New York University.

Today, our guest is Liz Keogh. She is challenged with the heuristic “Ongoing Education‘ from the Cloud Native Patterns repository (https://www.cnpatterns.org/organization-culture/ongoing-education). We discuss the learning at the individual, team and organisation levels. As the interview unfolds, Liz links Cynefin domains to the different learning styles, as well as BDD. In her words, BDD is all itself about learning! Liz recommends: Wardley Maps (https://medium.com/wardleymaps/on-being-lost-2ef5f05eb1ec) by Simon Wardley Crossing the river by feeling the stones (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IW9L1uNMCs) by Simon Wardley Commitment: Novel about Managing Project Risk by Olav Maassen, Chris Matts and Chris Geray Cynefin for everyone by Liz Keogh (https://lizkeogh.com/cynefin-for-everyone/) Liz Keogh (@lunivore) is a Lean, Agile and Cynefin consultant. She has roots in the BDD community, and she told us, she will be back to development work.

In this episode, we host Andrea Goulet, and she brings her own heuristic: “Empathy system architecture”. She has been doing research about empathy within the software industry, and the results are amazing. We discuss the implications of empathy both at the individual level, as well as, group level. Last but not the least, we discuss one of her passions, legacy systems and the hidden communication artifacts with it! Andrea recommends: Practical Empathy, For Collaboration and Creativity in Your Work by Indi Young    The War For Kindness, Building Empathy In A Fractured World by Jamil Zaki Living Documentation: Continuous Knowledge Sharing by Design by Cyrille Martraire Andrea Goulet (@andreagoulet) is a sought-after keynote speaker for conferences around the world, empowering audiences to deepen their technical skills for understanding and communicating with others. She is best known for her work defining Empathy-Driven Development, a framework that helps software engineers anchor their decisions and deliverables on the perspectives of the people who will be impacted by what they create. Andrea is a co-founder of Corgibytes, a software consultancy that helps organizations pay down technical debt and modernize legacy systems. You can recognize her by the JavaScript tattoo on her wrist and learn more about her work at https://empathyintech.com.

Dragan Stepanović is our guest, and he brings his heuristic: “Continuous code reviews enable higher team's throughput”. We dive into Dragan’s research on how async code reviews affect the quality and throughput of teams that create and maintain software. He also shares how his research challenged some of his assumptions, and we finalise discussing his experiences bringing his research to management. Dragan recommends the following resources: The Principles of Product Development Flow from Donald G. Reinertsen The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win from Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford The Goal from Eliyahu M. Goldratt Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation from Jez Humble and Dave Farley Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations from Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim Dragan (@d_stepanovic) is based in Berlin and currently works as a principal engineer at HelloFresh. Typically on the search for better ways of working, exploring ends of the spectrums, and helping teams and organisations try out counter-intuitive ideas that initially don't make a lot of sense but end up as completely opposite of that. It's been a long time since he fell in love with eXtreme Programming, Domain-Driven Design, and software as a craft (founder of Software Crafting Serbia community). In the last couple of years, he enjoys endless discussions connecting the Theory of Constraints, Systems Thinking, Lean and socio-technical topics.

Today we host Johanna Rothman, and she is challenged with the heuristic “Get the team in a rhythm” from the Xebia Essentials repository (https://essentials.xebia.com/team-rhythm/). She starts explaining how the team rhythm and feedback cycles are connected and can strengthen each other. We discuss the role of a manager, and also how the managers should operate as a team, rather than be an extension of a team. Last but not the least, she shares her experiences with agile leadership, where it is necessary to move between discovery and delivery modes. And she left us with a heuristic, “Prune the decision tree”. Johanna recommends: Multiple shot feedback loops support innovation: https://www.jrothman.com/mpd/2020/12/multiple-short-feedback-loops-support-innovation/ The pretty link for all three Modern Management Made Easy books: https://www.jrothman.com/mmme The hiring book: https://www.jrothman.com/hiring Multiple short feedback loops support innovation: https://www.jrothman.com/mpd/2020/12/multiple-short-feedback-loops-support-innovation/ Some posts on management cohorts: https://www.jrothman.com/mpd/2021/03/management-peer-cohort-vs-team-pairing-and-mobbing/ https://www.jrothman.com/pragmaticmanager/2021/01/create-your-peer-management-team-for-fun-and-profit-and-to-solve-problems/   Johanna Rothman (@johannarothman), known as the “Pragmatic Manager”, offers frank advice for your tough problems. She helps leaders and teams do reasonable things that work. Equipped with that knowledge, they can decide how to adapt their product development. With her trademark practicality and humour, Johanna is the author of 18 books about many aspects of product development. Her most recent books are the Modern Management Made Easy series, From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams, and Create Your Successful Agile Project. Find the Pragmatic Manager, a monthly email newsletter, and her blogs at jrothman.com and createadaptablelife.com.

Monarch Wadia is our guest, and he is challenged with the heuristic “Master your tools” from the Xebia Essentials repository (https://essentials.xebia.com/master-your-tools/). Monarch gives a different perspective to master the tools, which stems from his experience as a Bootcamp organiser. We discuss the differences between colleague and Bootcamp education and how the education paradigm shifts, at least with our industry. It was the start to go down the rabbit hole on how technology influences our culture and how we, humans, are changing our interaction patterns. Monarch goes off script and recommends that we should decondition rather than discuss what we already know.  Monarch Wadia (@monarchwadia) proudly identifies as a self-taught developer. He sees software programming as a democratic industry that welcomes everyone who seeks to enter it with open arms, provided they're willing to put in the hard work needed to learn the ropes. He has led teams of more than 100 software engineers as a software architect, is the founder of two startups, and has nearly 10 years of experience in the industry. As Mintbean's CEO, he enjoys creating mentorship and career opportunities for newer web developers.

In this episode, Julie Lerman is our guest, and she is challenged with the pattern “Conserve familiarity” from the Object-Oriented Reengineering Patterns repository (http://scg.unibe.ch/download/oorp/OORP.pdf). Throughout her career, Julie uses this pattern to be an enabler for conversations with people who use the systems. The talks are crucial to understanding the needs of people and how they use software that might be considered legacy but has a purpose. She shares her field stories, where Julie describes the patterns and techniques to maintain software that is expected to have a long lifetime. Julie suggests the following resources: You are the most important resource! Domain-Driven Design books Domain-Driven Design Fundamentals course by Julie Lerman and Steve Smith (https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/domain-driven-design-fundamentals)  Object-Oriented Reengineering Patterns (http://scg.unibe.ch/download/oorp/OORP.pdf)  Julie Lerman (@julielerman) is a Microsoft Regional Director, Docker Captain and a long-time Microsoft MVP who now counts her years as a coder in decades.  She makes her living as a coach and consultant to software teams around the world. You can find Julie presenting on Entity Framework, Domain Driven Design and other topics at user groups and conferences around the world. Julie blogs at https://thedatafarm.com/blog, is the author of the highly acclaimed “Programming Entity Framework” books, the MSDN Magazine Data Points column and popular videos on Pluralsight.com.