Middle Managers, the Flow of Ideas, and Innovation

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It really does take a village, not just upper management.

Few people in an organization have been the focus of so much attention in innovation circles as middle managers. Depending on your point of view, they are seen as either an essential conduit by which information flows, or a barrier to the spread of ideas and knowledge.

Indeed, it’s a topic I myself touched upon when I looked at some new research from Wharton’s Ethan Mollick on the topic. Mollick suggested that middle managers are especially important in industries that require innovative employees such as biotech, computing, and media.

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Hierarchy = The Matrix: We Don’t See or Question It

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The Matrix is real, my friends.

The hierarchy is at the very center of our lives. We have experienced it in our school years and later when working in organizations. It’s existence and function is tacit in our understanding of reality.

At the Agile Alliance Change Agents workshop, it became clear to me that the existence of hierarchy was greatly influencing the sessions. I sensed that there were two broad themes that emerged:

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Table Inheritance: What’s It Good For?

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Table inheritance is one of the most misunderstood — and powerful — features of PostgreSQL. With it, certain kinds of hard problems become easy. While many folks who have been bitten by table inheritance tend to avoid the feature, this blog post is intended to provide a framework for reasoning about when table inheritance is actually the right tool for the job.

Table inheritance is, to be sure, a power tool and thus something to use only when it brings an overall reduction in complexity to the design. Moreover, the current documentation doesn’t provide a lot of guidance regarding what the tool actually helps with and where are the performance costs and because inheritance sits orthogonal to relational design, working this out individually is very difficult.

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Benchmarking RavenDB Bulk Insert on Commodity Hardware

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We got a few requests for some guidance on how to optimize the RavenDB insert rate. Our current benchmark is standing at 135,000 inserts/sec on a sustained basis on a machine that costs less than $1,000. However, some users tried to write their own benchmarks and got far less (about 50,000 writes/sec). Therefore, in this post, I’m going to do a bunch of things and see if I can make RavenDB write really fast.

I’m going to be writing this post as I’m building the benchmark and testing things out. So, you’ll get a stream of consciousness. Hopefully it will make sense.

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5 Questions To Ask Yourself Before Writing Code

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There’s no room for ‘gung-ho’ coding when quality and efficiency are your goals.

Writing code is like finding your path through a dark forest. Behind each tree can lurk a monster, a treasure, or a pit. Or there is no path at all. You don’t know until you look.

For me, this attitude encapsulates the essence of writing software empirically.

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Working With Filters in Spring

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In this article, I am going to talk about how to best implement filters over HTTP requests in Spring. That is, assuming we have a program listening in a URI, we can specify that we want to execute something before the requests are processed by the controller.

This is very useful if we want all the requests to meet a requirement, for example, that they must include a specific header.

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What Developer Relations Is and How to Do It

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I’ve worked with Developer Relations for many years now, and I think it’s a fascinating topic with many takes on what it is and how to do it! I wanted to share my view on it here, and what I think it encompasses.

Last year I gave a presentation called "Have you tried listening?" at the DevRel Summit which I think outlines a number of the main DevRel concepts and areas, and examples from my personal experiences with them.

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Docker Snafu Leads to Millions of Downloads of Vulnerable JDK

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Attention to detail matters, folks.

If you’re one of the more than ten million developers who downloaded the official Docker images for OpenJDK 8 and 11 from mid April until about a month ago, you’ll really want to make sure you get those updated stat. 

Due to innocent enough confusion over tagging protocols, Debian volunteers populated their repos with unreleased versions of the JDKs some weeks before the final versions were ready to go, but failed to clearly label them as such.

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Basic React Navigation for React Native Apps

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Introduction

Creating an intuitive navigation UI is essential for any mobile app. Because we build custom software at SmartLogic, most of our mobile apps require different navigation setups, but they often have a lot in common. We use React Navigation which makes it easy for users to move across different screens. Built-in options allow us to quickly add UI features while also being fully customizable. In this post, I’ll walk through a basic React Navigation pattern we’ve used and the steps to get it up and running.

Below is an example of the architecture of common patterns we use. We have the main navigation for our app, different navigation stacks (more on this later), screens and a tab navigation setup as well.

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The Value of Security Testing in QA

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Over in the TechWell Hub, I was recently asked by a fellow community member, "Is there value in having traditional testers do security testing in addition to the testing taking place from our security group?" I thought it was a great question, and it deserves a more detailed response.

For many organizations, traditional software and testing groups are separated from the IT security group. The first is just concerned with functionality, while the latter cares only about security. In many cases this results in adversarial relationships, which almost always leads to some challenges for software development teams:

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