2019

This month I want to highlight a blog post, The Product-Minded Software Engineer, by Gergely Orosz (see October 2019 for another article from Gergely). This post discusses how product-minded software engineers form the nucleus of successful products, and steps you can take to be more product-minded. I love this line of thinking, it speaks to several of…

This month I want to highlight an Amazon blog, Migration Complete – Amazon’s Consumer Business Just Turned off its Final Oracle Database, by Jeff Barr. This blog discusses how Amazon’s consumer business sunset Oracle over the course of several years, culminating in this announcement two weeks ago. An undertaking of this scale is unprecedented, made possible by…

This month I want to highlight a Stack Overflow blog, How to Make Good Code Reviews Better, by Gergely Orosz. This blog differentiates between good code reviews and great code reviews by advocating for thinking big picture as you review the code. We perform code reviews daily as part of our job, this blog does a wonderful…

This month I want to highlight a blog post, The Technical Side of the Capital One AWS Security Breach, by J Cole Morrison. This post highlights the reason why Amazon hammers home the tenet that security matters in everything we do – the consequences of a security breach are far-reaching. As the article demonstrates –…

This month I want to highlight a blog post, A Conspiracy To Kill IE6, by Chris Zacharias. This is a fascinating story that is fraught with good and bad lessons. Chris details the developer pain associated with supporting IE6, and their non-sanctioned plan to deprecate support. There are so many actions in this article that a development team…

This month I want to highlight a blog post, 7 absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer, by Monica Lent. Monica details seven important-sounding truths that, upon further experience, required nuance to better understand the reality of software development. This post is excellent in its relevancy to what we do, and carries helpful reminders for both our…

This month I want to highlight an article detailing Amazon’s effect on open source software companies, Amazon Has Gone From Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor, Say Open Source Developers. This article details how AWS offers products that compete with open source alternatives (such as Elasticsearch), and how there is a conflict of interest when AWS operates…

This month I want to highlight a white paper by NASA, The Power of Ten – Rules for Developing Safety Critical Code. This paper is fascinating because these rules are critical for NASA to ensure safety yet they don’t all apply to the code we create. These coding rules cast a light on differences in how good…

This month I want to highlight an article by Forrest Smith, My Favorite Paradox. In this article, Forrest discusses how cursory data evaluation can easily lead to incorrect conclusions. As products begin to gather customer data and use that data to make decisions on behalf of the customer, this article is a good reminder of how to…

This month I want to highlight an article by Michael Lynch, Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself. This article talks about the Google promotion process and how this author discovered the value in optimizing the work he did for promotion rather than for the betterment of his team. Stories like this serve as a reminder…