Don't Mess With Delivery 🔗
If your team has consistent, reliable delivery of working software to production, you’re crushing. Don’t mess with it. It's astonishing how many teams [...]
Matt Blodgett
Posts
User Advocate vs. Front-End Engineer 🔗
I really enjoy doing UI work: being close to the user's mind, thinking deeply about interaction design, and how small changes can massively improve so [...]
Above All Else, Sustainability 🔗
From the principles of the Agile Manifesto: Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to ma [...]
Agile as Progressive Enhancement 🔗
When I was coming up as a young web developer. the concept of progressive enhancement was kind of at the hipster vanguard of web development. This was [...]
Legibility 🔗
I recently came across a blog post called Seeing Like a Software Company by Sean Goedecke on Hacker News. The post hooked me right away by introducing [...]
The Financial Architecture of Software 🔗
Conway's Law is foundational to software engineering. It says: Organizations which design systems...are constrained to produce designs which are copi [...]
Slow Is Smooth, Smooth Is Fast 🔗
If you want to move fast, don’t make speed your goal. Make smoothness your goal. Fast naturally follows smooth. Every software organization wants to b [...]
Sprints Balance Consistent Delivery With Optimal Value 🔗
Value, value, getting value to users. Work on the most valuable thing, always. You could probably summarize the Agile philosophy as "deliver value to [...]
Sprints Need a Cooldown 🔗
Teams vary in the amount of handwringing their leaders do about sprints that aren't perfectly rightsized. What if we bit off too much work at the star [...]
There's a Fine Line Between Increasing Productivity and De-skilling 🔗
In the software engineering profession, there's a concept called "resumeware". It's software that was made with the engineers involved in the design s [...]
Calibrating Your Care 🔗
I've been a subscriber to the r/ExperiencedDevs subreddit for a few months, and I've noticed a common pattern. Someone will post a question to the gro [...]
Don't Let an LLM Write Your Unit Tests 🔗
Writing unit tests is one of those tasks that software engineers often see as tedious. In fact, I've heard from fellow engineers that unit test genera [...]
Copilot Is Outsourcing 2.0 🔗
Decision-makers can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. (Or, in this context, remain employed.) - Will Larson, "Career Advice in 202 [...]
Engineering-led Research Tickets 🔗
One of my optimistic beliefs about software engineers is that we're full of good ideas about how things around us could be improved. We're smart peopl [...]
Software Engineer Career Levels at Companies You've Heard Of 🔗
I found a site called Progression.fyi that curates a list of "career frameworks," or in other words, the level-progression system of titles that a bun [...]
Heisenberg Effect in Software 🔗
One of the greatest services that software engineers provide is that we help people understand their own thought processes. We're transcribers of huma [...]
Are You a Stable or Volatile? 🔗
I've written before on this blog about the different personality traits of software engineers, and how different traits balance each other on a team. [...]
Who Writes the Backlog? 🔗
The Product Owner has the final say in backlog prioritization. But who writes the backlog? Is it always the product owner? My experience with Agile ha [...]
Legacy Systems Age in Reverse 🔗
I feel like every job I've ever had in software there has been some old legacy system hanging around that everyone denigrated and perennially spoke ab [...]
Scrum Tensions: Code Review 🔗
There are tensions in Scrum anywhere you have intra-sprint cycles that must resolve by the end of the sprint. In my last post I wrote about manual qua [...]
Scrum Tensions: Manual QA 🔗
After working for many years in the software industry, almost always using a methodology resembling Scrum, there are certain tensions that I've come t [...]
Continuity of Leadership 🔗
There's a Kafkaesque situation that develops in companies that cannot retain senior employees. A team feels a sense of urgency about shipping software [...]
Daring to Care 🔗
The most effective technical leader I ever worked with had a track record for coming onto a project and whipping it into shape. His ideas were not gro [...]
Movin' Tickets 🔗
Recently I was re-reading Joel Spolsky's classic blog post The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code. I hadn't read that post in many years. Although a l [...]