Those quarterly objectives

Try something different this quarter

The Beautiful Mess from John Cutler is often a “must read”, and this one focused on quarterly goals is no different. John suggests quarterly objectives are often put off until the last minute, or can become a boring pattern of eventual achievement. Perhaps in Q2 2024, we could shake things up a little? He proposes a potential structure, similar to Shape Up, but caveats:

This is one of a million experiments you can run to address these issues. The details matter less than the intent. Roll your own!

“Lies, damned lies, and statistics”

Laura Tacho (another frequent “must read”) discusses some of the metric traps in mind as the team asks that key question…

“What data are you going to use to evaluate my performance?”

Whilst metrics and tangible targets are important, if we focus solely on them we might fail to see the value in the person who never completes a user story, but who pair programmes with the whole team and makes them immeasurably better than they would be alone.

Or, as Chris our Head of Technology said:

it’s the productivity of the team as a whole that is important and if folks are too focused on making themselves look good/improving their own metrics it can lead to negative behaviours

Tech Tips

Here’s a few fun and helpful tools we’ve been using recently:

• Git supports multiple working trees, so you can checkout and work on two (or more!) branches at once rather than needing to do the stash dance.

• REPLs and Playgrounds for languages are good for everyday use as well as for learning – here’s a great JavaScript playground App called RunJS which also supports TypeScript

• Not every team benefits from having a designer on staff to collaborate with - when you don’t, tools like UI Colors can plug a gap and generate Tailwind friendly styles from a single swatch

Don’t panic! Don’t panic?

There have been a number of significant security breaches in the last couple of weeks, from exploits in Apex Legends to architecture vulnerabilities in Apple Silicon to compromises in the XZ Utils package.

Firstly, it’s important to be sure that we keep up-to-date both in our awareness, and also in our software/hardware maintenance, so please do that before anything else.

But then we must ask, do we trust our processes? Do our pipelines ensure resilience? Have we tested and probed our system for such eventualities? If we use tools from package repositories like Homebrew blindly because everyone else uses them, do we really know what could be going wrong and where we can monitor for those issues?

MITRE’s CVE Program is a useful starting point for understanding your degree of risk from cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

Three Quick Links

1. The White House published a report (PDF) looking into how to reduce memory safety vulnerabilities and explore software measurability... What do you think of the “recommendations”?

2. Considering replacing C++ after reading the report above? Your serverless project might be interested in Rust.

3. Do you have an addiction to opening browser tabs? How do you manage those tabs? Could tools like Workona or Aboard help you, or do you question the security of such plugins?

See you later?

Following from the success and popularity of #1, we will be re-running our Capture the Flag #2 event with Vertical Structure on Thursday 11th April. Spaces are limited, so get in touch sharpish if you have a team that might be interested.

And if you want to make your Thursday 11th totally epic, why not join the AWS Cloud Club // Back in Belfast on Thursday evening at Instil HQ :)