Michael Long

How to ruin a Developer's or UX's Designer's day. And save the product. Yes, let's explore and use your product. It's obvious...right? uh right? of course! Any child can follow along! Children can think like this until they are trained out of it. Obviously a skit. but how often has it happened in real life? If a person or company has a lot of hubris and doesn't think about and test edge-cases .. well .. at best one can get unexpected results. At worst - a catastrophic failure. ps. I don't know if he is talking to her, or a child off screen, or himself. I was first slightly offended. Then I realized made the skit even more amusing. Developers watching QA test the product. https://lnkd.in/eWZi8W22

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How can you manage a software engineering team when you are not a software engineer yourself? What has helped me immensely over the years: First off, yes, I have an engineering team under my leadership. Of course, I am unable to do code reviews or advise functionally. So how do I do it? A list of points, with some nods to musical pieces. Beyonce, All the Single Ladies - NOT I am not alone in this endeavor. I have co-functional leads who I can ask and get advice from anytime. My work would otherwise be impossible. Vybz Kartel, I Can I used to work in functions that often resembled PO work. Plus, I have worked with engineering teams in close collaboration for over a decade now. So I understand and can steer the dynamics. Machel Montano, Endless Wuk I am capable of understanding the business side. If I know why and where we are going I can translate that to the team and beyond. Lisa, Rockstar Believe it or not - I can put together a couple of lines of code. I have worked on some smaller, private projects before. Do I code in my free time? No. But I have seen what the basic structures are and applied them. Danagog, Hakuna Matata I can listen and listen well. I can advise based on my professional and life experience. I have empathy in droves. I can understand the lived realist of a developer, a PO, a designer, an agile coach. Have you seen or experienced non-technical managers? What was that like? Would you be open to be managed by a manager who is not able to functionally feedback you?

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This is a great blog entry on the "devaluation of frontend" development. https://lnkd.in/gDuGeh7n You should read it. A few passages that jumped out at me: "We often aren’t included at the beginning stages, where we could easily identify costly accessibility, performance, and user experience mistakes; we’re brought in at the end, when things have already been built and it’s too late to change anything significantly." - THIS - I had a job for awhile where I was treated as a fixer/styler in spite of 5+ years at that point as a professional developer working in both backend and frontend languages. It was like getting very skilled at UI work made folks skeptical of all of my backend and regular programming skills. That was in spite of having a math degree and starting my software engineering career as a python developer. Meanwhile, you wouldn't believe the skepticism that we encounter when trying to tell folks that there is a "right" way to build the frontend so that you don't have to go back and fix accessibility problems or cross device issues. Because frontend skills are so devalued, it is very common to just expect a backend engineer to do them regardless of whether they have ANY skill in that area. I've seen it happen many, many times that a person with sometimes LESS than entry level skills on the frontend are just assigned to build new frontend features or make a major UI update. I mean it is literally common for someone who could NOT get hired as a frontend developer to be assigned to build a major new frontend/UI update. To use the building analogy, it's like you suddenly decided your plumber installing your sinks and tubs should be able to handle the installation of windows, doors, shingles, trim and paint. And this bit (https://lnkd.in/gMdmebAj): "Writing CSS seems to be regarded much like taking notes in a meeting, complete with the implicit sexism and devaluation of the note taker’s importance in the room." Yes, this. And guess what? Bad HTML and CSS can eat up your time and resources just as surely as any other part of the codebase. But now that you are putting someone on it who doesn't have those skills, like a very expensive backend software engineer with more than a decade of experience, you may be taking many times longer to find and resolve the problem than if you had put someone on it who works with it every day, or that was actually an expert. I mean should you put someone on that UI bug who cost $60/hour and can fix it in 10 minutes or someone that costs $100/hour and can fix it in 6 hours to a week? I am NOT joking about those times. Expertise and skills in one area of the stack, does not magically jump over to others.

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If my team had $1 for every time someone said that they were lucky to have a technical writer embedded on the team, we’d all be millionaires! 🚀 For many companies, technical writers are not embedded into engineering teams. They probably should be, here’s why and how you should do it: Read more: https://lnkd.in/eJmuP8XK #technicalwriting #techComm #techWriting #ContentStrategy #documentation #informationdevelopment #devrel #DeveloperRelations #DevOps

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During my time at LoopQA, I've found that an effective model for leveraging automation involves a clear division of responsibilities between development and QA teams. I'll caveat this by saying, I generally advocate for developers to refactor the automation they break, but the reality is that most organizations aren't willing to invest their time into it. Hence, having a dedicated QA team for E2E tests often proves more practical. Here's a typical and highly functional workflow: Local Development: -Developers work on their local environments. -They run unit tests and integration tests to ensure their code is functioning as expected. Dev/Test Environment: -Code is merged into a shared Dev/Test environment. -Unit/Integration Tests: These tests must pass before any merge can occur. If they fail, the merge fails. -E2E Sanity Tests: These are also run, but they can fail for both valid and invalid reasons. Developers need to be adept at identifying actual bugs versus new legitimate failures. -Automation teams step in to refactor failing E2E tests to ensure stability. A common problem here is when dev teams opt not to refactor failing tests, leading to false negatives and potential issues down the line. Stage/Pre-Prod Environment: -After passing all tests, the code moves to the Stage/Pre-Prod environment. -Any merge to this environment is contingent on passing E2E tests along with unit and integration tests. Production Environment -Finally, the tested and validated code is merged into the Production environment. Key Insights: -This model ensures that unit/integration tests act as crucial gatekeepers, providing immediate feedback to developers. -E2E tests, maintained by the QA team, ensure overall system validation and highlight integration issues early. -Collaboration and clear division of responsibilities between dev and QA teams maximize the value of automation, leading to robust and reliable code delivery. #SoftwareDevelopment #QA #Testing #DevOps #SoftwareQuality #Automation #ContinuousIntegration #ContinuousDeployment

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I once asked a lead engineer on Angular: Which is better: Angular or React? His response: "Both require good engineering to be effective." So, my developer friends, consider this a reminder that "frameworks" like Diátaxis are fine, but they still require good engineering--such as UX, information architecture, style, maintenance processes, and so on--to create great documentation experiences for your customers. Alas, the framework alone isn't enough.

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You'd think that after 15+ years I'd be safe from null reference exceptions... Null always comes back to bite though! I was working in my ASP NET Core app and had written a method signature that allowed nulls to be returned. I was using a custom result type that allowed for the result value (or null) or an exception to come back. However, the calling code that I wrote never had any handling for null to come back! Guess what happened? Boom. We can never be *too* careful around null! 👇Check the comments for the full video!👇 ---- 🎬 Check out Dev Leader on YouTube for multiple full-length videos weekly! 🗣️ Share with your network! #CSharp #ASPNet #ASPNETCore #DotNet

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Anybody who is going through code interviews knows to manually test and find bugs. The fundamental problem is to KEEP YOUR SH*T TOGETHER when you find a bug. Don't overindex on the exciting joy/embarrassment of finding the bug. In fact, if you've found one, there are likely more. Keep a cool head, reset yourself emotionally, and start your testing FROM SCRATCH and find them. And most importantly... keep it cool. #codinginterviews #coding #crackTheCodingInterview

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I see a surge of posts on LinkedIn along the following lines: "I am a better software developer than anyone I know. However, despite this, I keep getting fired (or nobody wants to hire me)." Well, the inconvenient truth is that, if you keep getting fired (or if you are struggling to get hired), you should consider that you may not be as good as you think you are. I am not trying to disparage you. The data in your environment shows that you may be wrong. However, thinking that you are already better than everyone else prevents you from growing to the level where you become attractive to employers or consulting clients. After all, how can you learn anything if you believe that nobody has anything worthy to teach? This is the opposite of impostor syndrome, but it's much worse. While impostor syndrome is unpleasant, it actually motivates people to keep learning. The superiority complex, on the other hand, stops any learning in its tracks. P.S. If you comment on any of my posts with thinly veiled insults and your profile is a combination of you saying how you are better than everyone else and complaints about how you never got any reply back despite sending out 500 resumes, I will not bother engaging in any debates with you. I will block you right away.

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Salary aside, these are the 3 most common questions I get from software engineers open to exploring a new role: 1️⃣ What’s the tech stack? 🛠️ 2️⃣ What’s the company’s product? 🚀 3️⃣ What’s the work arrangement? (remote, hybrid, in-office) 🏢💻 What other factors do you consider essential when evaluating a new role? Drop your thoughts below! 👇

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This post serves as an excellent reminder that systems design and API design are *incredibly hard* to get right, *even* for people that have lots of experience and who have built similar systems in the past. As someone who has built systems used in production and lived to regret many of my decisions, I find this somewhat comforting. The linked sig-architecture thread [0] also has lots of interesting tidbits, including this bit from the legendary Tim Hockin: "Of all the APis we have, Node has some of the weirdest semantics. First, it's one of a very few "non-causal" objects(1) we have in core. Also, it is one of the oldest APIs, so it suffers from under-design, under-specification, organic evolution, and calcification - all contributing to or resulting from the success of k8s. If we were starting over, I doubt Node would be designed the same way. That said, we have to work with what we have. IMO, deleting a Node probably *should* cause a drain and should cause a controller to release the VM behind it (if appropriate), just like deleting a volume releases the disk behind it and deleting a service releases any LB attached to it. Can we fix that? I don't know...maybe?" https://lnkd.in/diFyvWhE by David Morrison [0] The whole thread is worth reading, but especially the laments of the folks that have been working on Kubernetes since the beginning: https://lnkd.in/d48cjiBZ

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I need to get better at identifying and coining maxims that I've come to believe. Here's some for pure func prog • Parse, don’t validate • Make illegal states unrepresentable • Errors as values • Functional core, imperative shell • Smart constructor https://lnkd.in/gvJC7f9X This is half the battle at communicating your work and being legible. Without a hook or gateway for people to Reminds me of the not-yet-numerous-enough (but aspiring to be) 95 theses on @sliminality (@slim.bsky.social)'s https://slim.computer Yet, important context gets left behind when tacit knowledge is packaged as quips. "Move fast and break things" and "Perfect is the enemy of done" are for people with a certain proclivity. If you don't have the problem, the advice is not for you. Too often people want to pick apart some quip communicating tacit knowledge, and then claim it's bad advice for everyone. More helpful would be to reintroduce context (either historical or interpretive for the modern era). "This advice only applies if you're in this context."

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Will Devin AI replace developers? 😱 Maybe 🤷🏻‍♂️ To me personally, Devin is a development tool and not a replacement...YET 🌚 I am not denying that Devin can code really well if all the claims are accurate. Eventually, it may replace developers. But developers don’t code just to code. We build products ✅ We build solutions ✅ And these happen to be made of code. Can companies ditch all developers today and expect products to still get built and maintained to the same standard as an enterprise-level solution? Nope 🙅🏻‍♂️ The quality of a product refers to how well it solves user problems. And those gaps between code, user, and solution? That’s where good developers provide values 👨🏻‍💻✨

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Earlier this year, I interviewed at the three biggest QA Contract companies. The position? Working on new AI driven QA programs... We are about 6 months out from when most of those programs will be shown to the major AAA game companies they work with. I'll say it before, and I'll say it again. If you want to continue to be in QA and work for AAA companies, you best be doing all you can to show your worth in regard to AI. Period. If you dont, things will get bad real quick... Also, I understand.. Unions.. Unions can also disappear real quick when that organization is no longer needed at the company.. You've been warned for awhile... Dont be too shocked when things go south for you and you just sit back hoping it doesn't. If you know AI/ML... You can be shown value elsewhere in the company once the first dominos fall... #qa #gaming #ai #ml

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What developers justify: Coding together 🤨 Picture this: Two developers, heads together, rapidly coding and discussing ideas. Their manager walks by, looking concerned. Later, the same manager smiles approvingly at a room full of developers in a status meeting, most looking at their phones. I sometimes wonder: Why does pair programming raise eyebrows, but status meetings get a thumbs up? Is it: • Distrust in developer productivity? • Insecurity about not understanding the process? • Lack of hands-on coding experience? • The comfort of familiar meeting formats? What's your take? Have you experienced this? #SoftwareDevelopment #Management #PairProgramming #Technology

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Can someone explain to me how to get "more experience"? I have 16 years of full stack software engineering experience, mostly in C# .Net 4.2 through 8, including .Net Core 2.x & 3.x, along with WCF, WPF, Winforms, Razor/Blazor, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with Entity Framework, Dapper, Linq, SQL Server, MySQL, SQLite, Oracle, NoSql, and other databases. And a few of those years include a combination of Java, PHP, and C/C++. I've also used MarkDown, PowerShell, MVC framework, Swashbuckle/Swagger, Newtonsoft, JSON .Net, TopShelf, and a variety of testing frameworks. But apparently that's not enough. In the past 3 years alone, I've learned ReactJS, TypeScript, Xamarin, XAML, Maui, NodeJS, Terraform, AWS, and Azure, and I'm currently learning Angular, but that doesn't cover the 3-5 years of experience jobs want. I've learned some of these skills through jobs, but also some on my own. Except that as often as companies want us to learn these skills outside of work, they only count professional experience when it comes to hiring. My last interview said I needed more experience, as if the previously mentioned 16 years wasn't enough, and neither was the 15 years of computer repair and networking before that, which their interview questions also covered. So if no one is willing to hire because people don't already have experience, how are we supposed to get the experience? And don't say "open source projects", because they don't count as professional experience. Or do I have to take a 50% pay cut to take an "entry level" job that still requires 3-5 years of experience that I somehow still don't have? People are quick to say that "no one wants to work anymore" when they can't get hired, but they never seem to think "businesses aren't willing to teach anymore" when they refuse to hire people. Why? Is it that we are so conditioned to think that it's always the individuals fault for not living up to expectations, instead of the businesses fault for setting unrealistic and ever changing expectations? So, I ask again, how can I get the required experience when employers refuse to hire unless I already have experience?

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Accessibility Tip of the Day 269: Writing as clearly as possible is called using "plain language". Plain language makes it easier for people to read, understand, and follow information online. This is particularly helpful for any sort of government communication. People need to be able to understand how to do things like apply for a passport, renew their driver's license, or vote. There's even a whole website dedicated to this concept! You can learn more here: https://lnkd.in/gw9H-zBC #accessibility #a11y #accessibilityTipOfTheDay

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