A Fistful of Links - June 17, 2019

Year 2 - Edition 24

A Fistful of Links is a weekly newsletter about leadership, technology, books, and anything else we felt compelled to share with others, brought to you by Og Maciel and Mirek Długosz.

"Blameless" postmortems don't work. Here's what does.

By J. Paul Reed - Submitted by Og Maciel

“Moving from a blameful to a blame-aware culture takes a lot of effort and time, no doubt. But research shows that the positive impact to safety, operator burnout, and ultimately business outcomes is improved using this approach.”
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How To Quickly Blow-Past The Top 1–3% Of Your Industry

By Benjamin Hardy, PhD - Submitted by Taz Brown

The more successful a person becomes, the more distractions there are. The harder it is to remain focused on their core objectives.
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Four Magic Numbers for Measuring Software Delivery

By David Lush - Submitted by Og Maciel

There are 24 capabilities that are correlated with high performing software delivery organisations
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7 absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer

By Monica Lent - Submitted by Yanis Guenane

In reflecting on this first decade of getting regularly paid money to type weird symbols into my Terminal, I wanted to take some time to share some of the ways my thinking shifted over the years as a developer.

For today’s junior developers: Maybe you’ll find something here you currently believe, and get inspired to learn more about it and why the topic is so multi-faceted. Or maybe you’ll find this post encouraging because you’re already so far ahead of where I was at your stage.

For today’s senior developers: Maybe you can relate, and also have some funny (and humbling) stories to share about your own life lessons when you were a junior dev.
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How to Get Regression Defects Under Control

By Kathryn Nest - Submitted by Corey Welton

Regression defects can be the most frustrating thing in the software world.

If you don’t know what that means, exactly, or you don’t have direct experience with it, let me set the stage for you. Your team has been working on a software release for months. It’s been something of a grind, and you’ve had to cut a few corners to go live by your deadline, but you’re going to ship on time. Sure, you anticipate some glitches, but at least you didn’t fail to deliver.

You ship the software and, sure enough, reports of glitches do come in. And, as you anticipated, these have to do with the new functionality you developed. Er, some of them do, anyway.

But there are a bunch of other problems besides. And these don’t seem to have anything to do with what you shipped. Users are reporting bugs in things that have always worked since the day you’ve developed them. And they’re understandably not happy about this.

These are regression defects.
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Happy reading!

The Editors at A Fistful of Links