Jev Forsberg

🏎️💨 Making of a Ridiculously Fast™ API client in R. Why my package is **~17x faster** than the community alternatives that call the **exact same API endpoints**. 👇🏽**design choices matter** ✨ https://lnkd.in/ggi_2XyQ

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I recently facilitated a workshop where a classic "know-it-all" senior developer reluctantly participated. The goal of the day-long Kata Culture Intro workshop was to guide teams in discovering the benefits of TDD and Pairing through a hands-on, Coyote Teaching style collaborative approach. Predictably, this developer voiced common objections throughout the day to TDD, claiming it was unsuitable for complex problems, start-up environments, fast-paced projects, and his personal coding style. My responses aimed to address his misconceptions: Complex problems: I highlighted how TDD excels in these scenarios, actually streamlining the development and discovery process saving valuable time. Start-ups/fast-paced environments: I shared a relevant anecdote from our time at Premera, where we rapidly delivered 13 functional prototypes (these were more than just prototypes) while simultaneously learning Azure. Jim Speaker remember that? Personal coding style: By the end of the day, the developer surprised me by acknowledging, "I had the wrong idea about TDD. Seeing it in action, I realize it could be a huge time-saver for us." While I'm constantly seeking out new methodologies, TDD still remains the most effective tool I've found. When combined with pairing or ensemble programming, its impact on software development is undeniable. TDD is easy to gain awareness of, deceptively challenging to gain proficiency with, and very rewarding/timesaving to have gained fluency with. #TDD #TestDrivenDevelopment #SoftwareDevelopment #Programming #Coding #Agile #ExtremeProgramming #Pairing #EnsembleProgramming

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Web-based Drag and Drop interactions present difficult challenges for accessibility. In her latest post on the GitHub blog, Kendall Gassner breaks down the challenges and explains how the team here at GitHub solved them. https://lnkd.in/d-jGPk-d

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I lead an informal 15 minute pre-standup meeting with my team (which we call Coffee-n-tix). It's a great tool for being an effective leader and for bringing psychological safety to my team. Engineers hate meetings, especially ones that _seem_ redundant, but below is why I keep it to this day. Reason 1: Recognition and reward > The normal standup is usually time-constrained. They're scheduled back-to-back across teams, so people usually have to be succinct to wrap up on time. > But on the pre-standup time, we can take our time to thank people for something they did. > We can go into details. We can be specific. We can share exactly what was done, how, and why it's appreciated. > This is a great mechanism for building team morale, preventing burnout, and rewarding laudable behavior. Reason 2: Preparing for the day > The standup meeting is all about what you're working on and your current blockers. It usually doesn't allow a lot of time to be strategic about how to use your time. > In the pre-standup meeting, we look at capacity and demand. We try to anticipate issues, and develop contingency plans for what to do when those issues come up. For example, we might decide that we need a person to not be overloaded with work because they need to be ready to provide production support, or we might decide that a brainstorming or pair programming session is needed. > This lets us be prepared ahead of time, instead of getting caught with our pants down. Reason 3: Tracking metrics. > During our pre-standup meeting, we look at our current metrics (usually just staring at the Jira board). > This is a great time to have honest, frank conversations about tickets that are taking too long, were not properly thought through, or have challenges that we didn't anticipate. > Then when we join the normal standup meeting, we can present a united front to the wider audience and we have a plan to tackle whatever the issue might be. Reason 4: Problem solving. > There isn't a single day where we don't confront problems or challenges. > And surprisingly, most times the problems are incredibly dumb like someone doesn't know how to deploy or test a change. > The pre-standup meeting gives us time to talk about those issues directly and resolve them. We can choose to just talk about them, do a quick diagramming session, or maybe even do a Code with me session. > Then when we join the standup meeting, we can go over those problems super briefly but also explain how we are already a step ahead and we have a solution in mind. > Or, if we have a big, scary problem that we can't figure out before standup, we've already ruled out all the easy stuff and we can focus the energies of the larger audience on resolving this issue, thereby saving everybody time. #engineeringmanagement #softwareengineering

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I find interesting the hype about counting downloads for a given tool as a metric for success. I guess it helps to show how popular something is, but I would love it if people also considered other aspects, such as project governance and project activity. Anyway, let's follow the trend (evidence in the comments): - Selenium Java downloads: 98.5M in May 2024 - Selenium active users in the last 30 days: 2.6M. Happy automation!

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Last night I released my #RustLang crate steady_state="0.0.16" About it: https://lnkd.in/gq-w86k3 (give me a star) I hope to clean up docs and tests for a 1.0 release next month. Right now I am asking for feedback. #Makers #inventors #builders #programming 38

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GitHub: removing the ability to use the keyboard to search for a branch is stupid and costs me two to four minutes per merge. Also, putting me in the hands of Copilot (which is what you call your bullshit AI) is like kicking me in the nuts after spitting in my face. What are you thinking?

I wrote a review of a resource I have found helpful in making 1:1's more effective. Check it out (and subscribe to my Substack for more of my writing on business, tech, and leadership)! https://lnkd.in/gvCxkbmi

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Harry Ronchetti has just shipped a complete do-over of Vizzly's Theme API docs! 👏 Documentation plays such an important role in building a first class developer experience, and it's deceptively hard to do! I'm excited to see what beautiful, custom-themed dashboards this update will help to create! https://lnkd.in/eKVCuqPd #docs #dashboard #customize

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I volunteered one of my #React.js #JavaScript #Node.js #Express.js #MySQL projects for an accessibility review from Michael Duran. You can see his breakdown in the video below.

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Last week I posted a video about using Open WebUI as an Ollama frontend. But if you need a simpler yet extremely powerful solution that doesn't need Docker, check out Msty. https://lnkd.in/gAaxEpkv

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There is no Trunk vs Git flow, this vs that tech/languages, Vim vs Modern IDE/editor etc. The list goes on. Use whatever tools or methods you need, to ship as many variants as you require, of whatever product it is that you are building. Just get the job done in whichever method feels right for your requirements.

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There are two types of mid-level software developers out there: First: Those teaching and sharing how to handle thousands or millions of transactions per second (100K tps). Second: Those avidly watching and reading about how to handle thousands or millions of transactions per second. Meanwhile, both are working on systems that barely handle 10 transactions per second on a good day. #ScalableSystem

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First off Larry Diehl is one of the brightest ppl I ever had the pleasure to work with. His technical insights and experience are only matched by his pragmatic approach in building products. I've personally witnessed and experienced him doing so in complicated dense domains and his discipline, awareness, and ability to navigate complex + dense topics (e.g. type theory and formal verification) while keeping a pragmatic product development roadmap is truly astonishing. Secondly, I've had the privilege of seeing Larry build Colimit in real-time! It truly is a seamless gateway to bring reliability and thoroughness to apis backed by solid and principled fundamentals. Like it or not...everyone building APIs IS building distributed systems. However, not all of us have the time, expertise, and skills to build and test them reliably. Larry Diehl and Colimit are paving the way to bring that to the masses. It's truly a space that needs more love and attention. Hoping to bring Colimit to some of our teams in due time too! Super excited for what's to come! #formalverification #distributedsystems #apis

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There’s something for everyone in web development in here:

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Having a consistent development environment for both learning and work removes the friction to actually get work done. With so many folks trying to get into programming, there was always a group that couldn't get their environment set up and they dropped off. It was always surprising to me that almost none of my classes either had a VM, Docker container, or version manager that was shown to us. In many projects I have been a part of I was always surprised when there was either less strict package management or no reproducible builds for troubleshooting. Both were added soon after though. Version and package managers should be involved in your dev workflows if you are making something that's more than a script or if multiple people are working on the project. If you are using Python check out pyenv and poetry to handle this. Starting this week we'll have a section on package and version managers in the AfterCompSci course. Check it out for a series of projects teaching real world engineering skills. https://lnkd.in/eJUdcswC

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I'm going to try a new, weekly, quick format for sharing out some #Ruby reminders that I have found useful in the past. I love alliteration, so I'm referring to these as Righteous Ruby Reminders 😁 You'll probably know some of these, but hopefully there will be a few new ones! Fetch Block Argument Did you know (or remember) that Hash#fetch can take a block argument to fallback to if the key is missing? You can evaluate any arbitrary code here (be careful of expensive operation) and it will use the block’s return, or even raise a different error besides KeyError. Right on!

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