The Good, The Bad And The Ugly About Estimates

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Ask any developer to estimate how long it will take for them to finish a project. You will see the loathing in their eyes. And for good reason. Estimates have been wrongly used for decades by a lot of managers who then hold the team accountable to their estimate as if it were the actual deadline. Even more frustrating, in many cases, those managers only act on the lowest number they hear from you! It’s as if they had a min() function, and they just keep trying to get the number lower. But engineering is not magic!! No wonder the hashtag #NoEstimates has become famous.

For this to happen, we (well…especially managers) need to abide by a few rules. Then we’ll see how estimates can improve the quality of your software. Yup, you read that right. Well, in my opinion, obviously.

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Buy or Build

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One question that I hear a lot of people asking is whether they should buy or build the software that they need to run their enterprise. This is often a difficult question to answer. One thing I can say having lived through many major software purchases is that the main cost was understanding a system that was purchased and that cost of understanding turned out to be far greater than expected. Large, expensive software products are often more costly to purchase then the price tag would indicate.

If you can gain a competitive edge through embodying it in software then it’s almost always better to build rather than to buy. This applies to entire products. Technology companies are sometimes purchased because of their customer base or inroads into a particular market segment or any number of other reasons. Of course, I’m not talking about off-the-shelf software. I’m talking about integrating essential components that were not developed in-house.

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How to Create a Threat Model for Cloud Infrastructure Security

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The practice of creating a threat model can help teams proactively understand and develop a strategy for managing the possible vulnerabilities their organization faces, instead of waiting until after an incident occurs. OWASP defines threat modeling as “a procedure for optimizing security by identifying objectives and vulnerabilities, and then defining countermeasures to prevent, or mitigate the effects of, threats to the system.”

SecOps teams can benefit from creating a threat model for cloud infrastructure and defining an approach to operationalizing, hardening, and automating security throughout the software development lifecycle. While it’s best to build security into the design of your systems at the outset, remember the motto:

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Defining Value in Community Launch and Growth

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Value in the community lifecycle is tricky to measure. Value and how you define it depends on what stage of the lifecycle your community is in. It is ever-changing, from the first launch to growth to maturity. You need to prove the value of your community if you want it to stick around and more importantly, grow.

The first stage of your community is actually getting it launched. You will undoubtedly get questions about how the site is doing, whether it is growing, and how you can prove that it is succeeding. Luckily there are hundreds of different metrics and data points you can look at when starting up a site.

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ASP.NET Core: Read the GPS Coordinates of a Photo

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During one of my ASP.NET Core classes I made a demo about how to read GPS coordinates from photo and display location on a map. I took my favorite photo of a beer kiosk in Krakow and displayed the location of this kiosk on a map. This blog post describes my experiment on getting GPS coordinates from EXIF data in an ASP.NET Core application.

Wikipedia defines EXIF (Exchangeable image file format) as a standard that specifies the formats for images, sound, and ancillary tags used by digital cameras (including smartphones), scanners, and other systems handling image and sound files recorded by digital cameras. Most of modern devices used to take photos save meta information in EXIF format to photos. It’s great but be aware – not all people may use this information in good purposes.

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Code Transformations

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A lot of poor designs can be attributed to sticking with an existing design as changing requirements show us the need for a better one. Oftentimes, an initial design is just a stab in the dark. We might not know enough to make an informed decision but we have to get something done, so we do what Agile says and we code up the behavior that we need right now and not worry about future requirements.

For most teams, the problem comes when they start to enhance that behavior and go back into the code to extend it. Now they’re asking the system to do something that it couldn’t do before and, instead of redesigning a feature to accommodate the new behavior, developers might try to hack in the new behavior while minimally impacting the existing design. But this can degrade the quality of the code when done over and over again in a system.

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Serverless With AWS: Image Resize On-The-Fly With Lambda and S3

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Handling large images has always been a pain in my side since I started writing code. Lately, it has started to have a huge impact on page speed and SEO ranking. If your website has poorly optimized images it won’t score well on Google Lighthouse. If it doesn’t score well, it won’t be on the first page of Google. That sucks.

TL;DR

I’ve built and open-sourced a snippet of code that automates the process of creating and deploying an image resize function and an S3 bucket with one simple command. Check out the code here.

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Why Should You Be Invited to A Meeting?

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There was a Twitter interaction about testers being invited or not to team meetings and about providing value to the team.

And it got me thinking.

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What Do Agile Leaders Do?

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I’ve had this ongoing discussion with a few of my colleagues who say that the term “Agile leader” is an oxymoron — that the ideal organization is a bunch of Scrum Teams and not much else. Even in an ideal world, I disagree, and here’s why in a nutshell: I’ve never seen, and have not even heard of, an organization that was successful in their pursuit of agility who did not have a strong leader guiding the vision for what the organization can become, motivating people to achieve that vision, nurturing the pursuit of that vision, and protecting, when necessary, the people who want that vision from the people who don’t. 

The reason for this is simple and is as old as civilization. As Nicolo Machiavelli observed, 

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How Competition Affects Trust In The Workplace

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Competition is widely believed to have a corrosive impact on trust, but what happens when that competition comes from a rival firm? Does the external "threat" bind us together? That was the conclusion reached by a recent study from the University of British Columbia, Princeton University and Aix-Marseille University.

The researchers collected data from the manufacturing sector in both the United States and Germany, and it emerged that the more intense the competition within the sector, the more likely it was for pro-social behaviors, such as cooperation and knowledge sharing, within each company.

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