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Scaling Software Architecture via Conversations: the Advice Process
Andrew Harmel-Law recently published an article describing a decentralised, scalable software architecture process based on the "Advice Process". The Advice Process promotes software architecture by encouraging a series of conversations driven by an empowering, almost anarchistic, decision-making technique. It comprises one rule - anyone can make an architectural decision.
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Shifting to Asynchronous Communication in Software Teams
As some companies begin to go back to the office and embrace hybrid working, they are at risk of alienating those who wish to remain remote, which is looking to be a considerable number of workers in our industry. James Stanier suggests using more asynchronous means of communication and spending more time writing to each other rather than speaking in meetings.
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How to Work Asynchronously as a Remote-First SRE
The core practices for remote work at Netlify are prioritising asynchronous communication, being intentional about our remote community building, and encouraging colleagues to protect their work-life balance. Sustainable remote work starts with sustainable working hours, which includes making yourself “almost” unreachable with clear boundaries and protocols for out of hours contact.
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Will the Hybrid Work’s Great Paradox Be the Decade’s Challenge?
The pandemic moved the office home, and while the medical system is trying to eradicate it allowing us to resume our lives as we know them, we also need to understand what the new normal will be. While some leaders will return to the office as soon as it is allowed, others adopt a fully remote approach as the main-approach. Probably a hybrid approach would be the new normal for most of us.
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Dealing with Cognitive Biases in Software Development
Cognitive biases help us to think faster, but they also make us less rational than we think we are. Being able to recognize and overcome biases can prevent problems and increase the performance of software teams.
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How Mob Programming Collective Habits Can be the Soil for Growing Technical Quality
Mob programming can support teams in changing old habits into new effective habits for creating products in an agile way. Collectively-developed habits are hard to forget when you have other people around. Mob programming forces individuals to put new habits into practice regularly, making them easier to adopt. Teams are intolerant of repetition, looking for better ways of doing their work.
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How Organisational Culture and Psychological Safety Fosters Our Creativity
Organisations need to create the right conditions and culture for creativity to flourish so as to stay relevant, compete and thrive for the future. An addiction to burnout and fixation on productivity can stifle creativity. What’s needed is psychological safety, inclusion, experimentation, growth mindsets and allowing thinking time.
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How a Safe-to-Fail Approach Can Enable Psychological Safety in Teams
Companies can establish a culture of psychological safety among their employees, a culture in which failing is not frowned upon but rather is accepted as something that can happen to anyone. Safe-to-fail should be part of the corporate culture. A shift in the way we envision success can lead to a better understanding of where failure lies and provide courage to overcome our fears.
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Four-Day Work Week Gaining Traction
A number of studies and reviews have recently been published which look at the changes needed and the impact of shifting to a four-day work week. The consensus is that, while there are some challenges to be overcome, generally shifting to a four-day work week results in happier, more engaged staff with increased productivity.
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The Future of Agile in Africa: Challenges and Progress
The African continent is trailing behind in the adoption of agile compared to other continents as it faces wicked challenges and setbacks. However, the next two decades seem to be promising to the young continent, as tech startups, SMEs and large corporations are recognizing that a collaborative approach to product development leads to more productive and value-driven results.
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MLOps: Continuous Delivery of Machine Learning Systems
Developing, deploying, and keeping machine learning models productive is a complex and iterative process with many challenges. MLOps means combining the development of ML models and especially ML systems with the operation of those systems. To make MLOps work, we need to balance iterative and exploratory components from data science with more linear software engineering components.
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How External IT Providers Can Adopt DevOps Practices
IT suppliers can follow the “you build it, you run it” mantra by working in small batches, using an experimental approach to product development, and validating small product increments in production. The supplier has to find out what his client’s goal is, and it has to become the supplier’s goal as well to work in a collaborative way.
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Facilitating Team Health Assessments
Teams can do health assessments to explore and discuss their team’s health and happiness. It’s good to let teams create their own health check, understanding what healthy looks like for the team in question. As facilitators, we can help teams decide where and how to improve.
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Distributed DevOps Teams: Enabling Non-Stop Delivery
Keeping in touch and being cohesive as a distributed team is a challenge many face. Assigning stories from a shared backlog helped a distributed team in doing non-stop delivery, as did giving all members of the team the authority to promote to production and back-out code at need. You need to give attention to the architecture to prevent creating similar or duplicate micro-services.
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WhatsApp Adopts the Signal Protocol for Secure Multi-Device Communication
WhatsApp is testing its new architecture aimed to enable true multi-device message synchronization while preserving end-to-end cryptographic security. To this aim, WhatsApp is adopting the Signal protocol.