Posts

I first read Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim back in 2018 when it was a hot topic in the office; only an hour or two would go by between overhearing somebody talk about it, internal blog posts were being written, and we’d receive emails about following the findings.

One of the goals behind the book was to run a series of surveys, gathering 23000 responses across 2000 organizations, then using statistical methods on the results in order to find a way to measure software delivery performance, and to find out what drives it. One of the most impressive things about the book is that it not only presents the research findings, but also goes into detail about why the findings are trustworthy, meaning that they not only tell us what they learned, but how they learned it.

I recently read through the book again and took a bunch of notes which cover the main points.

As your career progresses, you’ll discover an increasing number of opportunities for mentoring others, and being an effective mentor will become increasingly important.

This blog post covers 5 things that you need to consider before becoming a mentor, along with some tips on how to select a mentee, and some pitfalls to watch out for.

A collection of 5 things from the week that I found interesting, am enjoying, or am working on.

This week:

• I’ve been amazed by: Photopea - an advanced image editor, which looks and behaves a lot like Photoshop, and runs entirely in your browser
• I’ve been experimenting with: CSS Grid. It makes my layout life easier, and it’ll make yours easier too.
• I’ve been watching: Keep Betting on Javascript by Kyle Simpson
• I’ve been reading: Ryan Holiday’s 32 Thoughts From a 32-Year-Old
• I’ve been thinking about: How important it is to write online

I’m not sure why it’s taken so long, but after 13 years of Webstock existing, this year was the first time that I attended.

While I haven’t attended Webstock until now, I have watched many of the recordings which are usually available a few months after each event was held, and it’s been interesting to see how the event, and the industry in general has changed over the years.

None of this year’s talks were technical, and all were about the human side of the industry - topics such as ethics, personal experiences, psychology, communication, and team health.

One of the original organisers stood up on stage at the end of the event, and said it best:

13 years ago we were rallying against nested HTML tables

Does the font in Chrome look really grainy in Windows when using RDP, even though fonts in all other apps look fine?

When you really want your fonts to be nice and clear like this:

There are a couple of ways that this can be fixed.

Currently there’s a bug in recent versions of create-react-app where debug breakpoints aren’t working in Chrome.

A collection of 5 things from the week that I found interesting, am enjoying, or am working on.

This week:

• I’ve been learning about: Single Sign-On and Sign-Out in .NET Core with OpenID Connect and IdentityServer4
• I’ve been watching: Andrew Tokeley’s talk on High Performance Product Leadership
• I’ve been happy to see that: Webstock is back on this year
• I’ve been thinking about: Lambda School sounds great
• I’ve been playing: The Witness

Using Git on Windows is way easier once you find a combination of tools that you’re comfortable with.

In this blog post you’ll learn about:

• Using Git via the command line on Windows
• A great Git GUI client for Windows and Mac
• The tool that I use for diffs, and resolving any Git merge conflict that may occur (including 3-way merges)
• Using Git with SSH authentication on Windows via .bashrc and Bash shell
• My .gitconfig

Impromptu speaking in front of an audience is challenging for most of us. Even the famous author and public speaker, Mark Twain, has been quoted as saying “I never could make a good impromptu speech without several hours to prepare it.”

If you struggle with scattered thoughts, or mind blank when impromptu speaking, then this blog post will help you.

In this blog post, you’ll learn some techniques to structure your speech when you’re on the spot, and some ways to quickly generate ideas when your mind goes blank.

In this blog post, you’ll learn how to host a sample Python web app on Elastic Beanstalk, using HTTPS, without a load balancer.

After following the steps in this blog post, you should end up with something that looks like the following image: