Re-commit to our relationship
Well, not that dramatic…
If you enjoy this newsletter, you know I struggle to keep up with it. It’s annoying for me, and perhaps for you. So, I’ll try something new, being less perfect.
You can subscribe to get notifications of posts I make to my blog, the more fragmentary version of this newsletter. I don’t want to force this on you, so you’ll need to re-subscribe by submitting your email address here.
WordPress.com’s interface for this is super goofy and ugly, but it will do the job. When you confirm your email, you’ll need to select how frequently you want to be notified: each time I post, daily, or weekly. If it was me, I’d subscribe at weekly. You can go in and change this as well.
If you’re an RSS person, you can also just subscribe to the feed.
So…we’ll see if that works. As much as I enjoy it, manually piecing together a newsletter on a meaningful enough cadence is too much for me. As I like to say on the podcast, I already have a job :)
Here’s one last thing to share here:
Developer toil
I’ve been working on waiting for this paper to get published. It documents a practice that the Pivotal/Tanzu Labs people have been doing, a developer toil survey. First, we develop the concept of “developer toil” in the paper. I think it’s a type of tech debt that isn’t noticed and optimized enough: all the work and waiting developers need to go through to finally start coding and running their software.
What I liked about this process when I learned about it is that it has a mechanism for finding developer toil - it answers the “how” of the problem. The Labs people use a survey that you can send out to developers to find and rank common types of toil. Then, if your someone in charge of improving how your organization does software (“digital transformation”) you can go through that ranked list and start to fix problems.
It’s pragmatic, perhaps imperfect, but it’s better than nothing and should be enough to get your started on whatever you think perfect is.
Go download it for free, in return for your email address, of course.