The Art of Documentation
Posted on August 30, 2022
| Craig Pardey
Documentation is one of the most valuable artifacts of any technology project or platform. It provides context to new joiners, avoids duplicating responses via Slack/Teams, and facilitates asynchronous communication, but it also requires constant care and feeding.
Confluence is where documentation goes to die
– Unknown
Most of the large enterprises that I’ve worked for have a large corpus of documentation in a wiki of some sort. Most of it is dangerously out-of-date, incomplete, duplicated, and fragmented across different pages or spaces.
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Basic Skills
Posted on August 1, 2022
| Craig Pardey
New technologies generate a lot of noise as they work their way through the hype cycle and it’s hard for newcomers to figure out what they should learn. Only a small number of these new technologies will survive the test of time, most will be forgotton, but the FOMO is real.
While there’s value in the process of learning the new hotness, I think you’ll see a higher lifetime return when you invest in learning the basic tools of the trade - the skills that you’ll use day in and day out, and skills that will transfer well from one job to the next.
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Autonomous Teams
Posted on November 29, 2021
| Craig Pardey
One thing that development teams constantly struggle with is striking a balance between building features, fixing bugs, paying down tech debt, and embarking on more ambitious activities like replacing core components in their architecture. It’s also something that Agile tries to solve but I’ve never seen it solved to everyone’s satisfaction.
And I think it’s because many Agile Product Owners are focused on the specifics of what features they’d like to see built instead of setting the direction for the dev team and letting them figure out how to get there.
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Do One Thing
Posted on January 26, 2021
| Craig Pardey
Software should do one thing, and do it well. Each piece of software should have a clearly-stated goal that is used to determine whether a particular feature should be implemented or not. When a proposed feature does not fit with the software’s stated goal then don’t implemented it. Just don’t.
Like adding source control to your product. We already have several perfectly good source control systems. Building your own custom source control system into your product is never a good idea.
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Trunk-based Development
Posted on January 4, 2021
| Craig Pardey
I’ve been working on re-platforming the online banking system for a Canadian retail bank for over two years. Leading up to the initial launch, The Business decided to defer a few features to the next release which was scheduled for about a month later. We created a release branch to support defect fixes found in testing, and the development team continued adding features to the develop branch. Bug fixes from release were merged into develop regularly.
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Subdomains
Posted on October 17, 2019
| Craig Pardey
Remember the Great Equifax Hack back in Sept 2017? Equifax came under a lot of fire for the way they handled the breach and one of their mistakes was using the custom domain equifaxsecurity2017.com for “customers” to check whether their personal information had been compromised. Shortly after the breach, several other lookalike domains were registered including securityequifax2017.com. In fact, the custom domain was so confusing that Equifax themselves directed people to the incorrect site via tweets on Twitter.
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The Data Interface
Posted on April 12, 2018
| Craig Pardey
A trucker delivering palletized cargo to a pier would have to remove each item from the pallet and place it on the dock. Longshoreman would then replace the items on the pallet for lowering into the hold, where other longshoreman would break down the pallet once more and stow each individual item - all at a cost so high that shippers knew not to send pallets to begin with. – The Box, Marc Levinson.
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Test First Manufacturing
Posted on March 29, 2018
| Craig Pardey
I’m currently reading The Box by Marc Levinson. It is a fascinating book that chronicles the changes in the shipping industry brought about through the introduction of shipping containers. It sounds dry, but it’s not. The innovators faced huge barriers, including governments, labour unions, and standards committees. I have such deep respect for Malcom McLean for persisting through the insurmountable bureaucracy.
At one point, they discuss how a particular design aspect of the container was deemed unsuitable and had to be rectified:
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Challenger Bank
Posted on November 1, 2017
| Craig Pardey
When I first heard about the so-called UK Challenger Banks like Monzo and Atom, I was amazed that there wasn’t a similar offering in Canada. The Canadian retail banking sector desperately needs new players bring compelling products to the market but nobody was doing it. There are some options like PC Financial and Tangerine but they’re both backed by one of the Big Banks (CIBC and Scotiabank, respectively). Nobody was attempting a ground-up rebuild of a bank using modern technology and practices.
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Heirloom Code
Posted on October 11, 2017
| Craig Pardey
Michael Feathers says that legacy code is any code without tests but I’d go a step further and say that legacy code is any code that is still running even though the original developer(s) are no longer working on it. And there is certainly plenty of that in financial institutions. There are other characteristics too, such as:
unreproducible production environment incomplete source control missing files ‘master’ fails to build no automated build process no release process few or no unit tests no way to run or test the code on a developer workstation little or no documentation none of the original developers available I am presently working on a codebase that checks all of the above boxes and it isn’t even that old but instead of dismissing it as an unmaintainable mess I have changed my mindset and have started referring to it as Heirloom Code.
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