Are you someone who sweats the small stuff?
I recently asked for a review of some React code from our engineering teams. I offered two possible approaches and asked which would be preferred. It turned out I should have taken secret approach 3. We encourage our engineers to consider every angle when pioneering solutions to problems, but in this case the extra approach didn’t answer my question! I wanted to debate A or B, not C.
At Instil, like with many companies, most of our teams are working on developing products for other people. And sometimes that willingness to question or suggest alternatives can cause difficulties.
Marty Cagan and Josh Kerievsky describe the challenges of applying a Product Model in Outsourcing.
few outsourcing firms will sign up to deliver outcomes. It’s not that they don’t want to. But if you’re contractually committed to delivering an outcome, yet you are also committed to delivering a specific solution, then you are almost certainly set up for failure.
Building good product is difficult, and most tech companies really struggle to get it right. Robin Rendle wrote recently that Design ain't a democracy,
what happens is tons of back and forth about competing ideas or competing projects instead of building things. And this leads to all sorts of wacko pseudo-scientific ways to prioritize tasks and even whackier ways of measuring the success of a product.
Miriam Suzanne pushes back a little,
Shared vision and collaborative process don’t just happen when good developers sit around a table. Like anything else, collaborative art and design are skills that people learn and practice.
One way to learn is to copy. Matthew Ström has written a short “book” Copying (is the way design works)
I’ve only been able to have a career in design because I copied.
I hope that by the time you’ve finished reading, you’ll see how important copying is. Right or wrong, virtue or vice, copying is the way design works.
While copying is good, we need to be careful to copy the right things. Collections like the Catalog of Dark Patterns are fun to explore, but are also really helpful references to guide developers away from bad practices.
Here's a couple of other design related resources to spur your thinking:
The Magic Color Picker - a great use of AI, my favourite is "the colour of the night sky just as the first stars come out"
And one other wrap-up link discovered by Instil's forward-thinking collaborators this week, what signal are you sending? Gaping Void encourage us to think about the culture of our organisations and how are actions change it.
Are we becoming the “kind of person who keeps their camera off?” and what else might that person do?
Then, there’s signaling to others. We’re social copying machines. Behavior spreads. One camera off can lead to another and another, and before we know it, we’re having a meeting with a bunch of black squares.
Before you go,
BSides Belfast is coming up on the 12th September - I think there's a waiting list for tickets.
Interested in speaking at NIDevConf? There's a potential speaker event tonight (don't worry if you miss it, there will be others).
And the AWS Community Day in Belfast is on the 6th September.
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Learning Links is a fortnightly email newsletter published by the Instil Learning team. We cover a range of topics, sharing links to relevant learning discovered and curated by the wider Instil team.
Learning Links is published on a Thursday afternoon, twice a month.
