A newsletter that started as a personal learning and getting-in-touch project by Ivan Krnic grew into a sociotechnical newsletter covering topics of technical excellence, organizational improvements, and productivity.
Maslow’s Hammer
The “Law of the instrument” or “Maslow’s Hammer” is a cognitive bias that involves an over-reliance on a familiar tool. You heard already that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
This bias is very active in software delivery – we get hold of one technology stack and one architecture, and continue replicating such systems irrelevant to the business case we’re solving. The first step in breaking this habit is understanding that not all business cases are the same. And we want business cases to be different since that is where innovation lies. Once we start looking for peculiarities of business cases, we will see them all over the place. And we can start discussing the most appropriate technology stack and architecture for each of those business cases.
Such discussions are always easier and more productive in a team since we can take into account different perspectives and experiences. Read here how we at CROZ are leveraging the Community of Practice for Architecture to generate insights and share knowledge.
Interview of the Month
Heidi Helfand @ QED conference
With QED 2022 conference behind us, we have started sharing talk recordings. Our first keynote, Heidi Helfand, VP of Engineering at Kin Insurance, talked about Dynamic Reteaming, a topic that is getting more important than ever. See Heidi’s talk here.
Would you like your new hires to deploy to production on Day 1?
Would you like to be like Etsy?
Kustodian tackles the eternal problem of developer onboarding and environment configuration by provisioning and managing roles and permissions to digital assets in all systems that support software development lifecycle.
Kustodian enables you to hit the ground running on Day 1.
Hand picked
90DaysOfDevOps – When you’re starting with DevOps, there are excellent books that will put you in the right mindset. If you want to get more hands-on, check out the path that Michael Cade took in his 90-day challenge to spend an hour a day getting foundational knowledge across a lot of different areas that make up DevOps.
Agile Threat Modelling – Workshop resource for threat modelling – Security, DevSecOps, “shift left”… all these keywords imply that we should start taking security seriously. It’s not like we don’t want to. Sometimes we just don’t know how. Folks from ThoughtWorks put together materials and instructions to facilitate the Threat Modelling workshop.
Netflix doesn’t want to hear it anymore – Technology used to be a differentiator in the streaming business but all major players have caught up with Netflix and now the wars are fought over the content on the platforms. With the focus moving from technology to content, it seems like some of the core Netflix culture practices have started to decay in the engineering community. Let’s hope this is not the case.
20 Things I’ve Learned as a Systems (Over) Thinker – When John Cutler shares advice, you take it
Read with us
The Three-Body Problem (The Three-Body Problem Series Book 1)
It’s been a long year. Wind down on a beach or over a beer and treat yourself to an SF masterpiece The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu.
The Three-Body Problem is a known mathematical problem, but what happens if you live in a world ruled by it?
Header photo by Jean van der Meulen
