Five for Friday – January 26, 2024
Busy – and weird week for me. But here are some insights to what I’ve been up to.
- More trash fiction. Almost done with the latest Jack Reacher “novel”. I’ve read them all, and while they’re completely templatized and formulaic, I still enjoy reading the new one every year. Note – the Reacher series on Amazon is also very good, but season 2 was a considerable drop off in quality from season 1 – but still worth watching.
- I absolutely loved this article on Kubernetes from The Zynga Team. Great info, and wonderfully written.
- There is SO much coming out about the benefits of Developer Experience recently – this ACM article from Nicole Forsgren, Abi Noda, and a cast of others (no offense) is a great read for those interested in the topic.
- I read – and re-read this article about Agile fading at large companies due to burnout – and.. it’s frustrating. Personally, I blame SAFe, but on a larger scale, it’s yet another example of people/teams trying to use tools and processes to solve human problems. Agile isn’t “a framework for faster delivery” – the principles focus on learning and adaptability, and if businesses don’t build that culture, of COURSE you get burnout and shitty delivery.
- The first programming language I learned (unless you call batch files programming) was C. My mentor, Chris, taught me the three most important things about programming in C (pointers, pointers, and pointers). With that in mind, I spent a considerable amount of time reading through reconstructed Duke Nukem 2 source code this week. I spent so much of my career reading and writing code similar to this that it brought warm fuzzies to my geek heart.
That’s all you get this week (not even gonna look to see if that’s five or not). Hang in there, and see you all in 7 days.