2019-02-10 10:56 — By Erik van Eykelen
Someone asked me what I'm reading/listening to and applying in my work these days with regards to software development, project management, and software architecture.
1) Apply The Twelve Factor method (https://t.co/ohkIO1fj2Q). It is useful, every single day. Teams who embrace it discover flaws in their architecture, their DevOps, etc. and once they adopt it, they are able to keep stuff cleaner over time.
2) Use DevOps, using whatever tool chain or tools/services you like but for the love of dev happiness embrace DevOps. Life is too short for manual ssh-ing into your own metal. Heroku is still my favorite "DevOps tool" packaged as a PaaS.
3) Adopt Kubernetes & Terraform. The container wars have been won by k8s. Once you grok that "infrastructure == code" your brain is permanently on overdrive.
4) Implement Scrum, or you own lightweight version of it as long as you practice it every working day. Scrum does not work if it's incidental, it must be ingrained. Doesn't work for you? Use GitHub Issues using a simple priority 1-2-3 assignment to every backlog item.
5) Learn from the Solo Founder movement. It is hugely inspiring to me, aspects are transplantable to large orgs. Give an individual champion [in your BigCo] time to build crazy new stuff. Next, give her team when it's promising. Listen all 80 episodes of https://t.co/8QDvMJAS7k
6) Go with the flow when picking a web app development framework. Use Node.js or a similar popular web framework (Rails is still my personal favorite). Don't worry about scaling, worry about running out of money or energy to push your pig over the hill.
7) Read and apply "It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work" (https://t.co/DQqj6a45FB), then read it again. Written by the folks from @basecamp. You want to hire nice, good people. News: they don't want to work in your shitty, chaotic, meeting-filled beehive anymore. Start changing.
8) Break large teams into squads by applying Spotify's engineering culture. Lots of good videos on this topic. Watch the longer ones, really inspiring. And it works in larger orgs, people grok it and like it.
