Through the stack 1.15 (week 24)
This is "Through the Stack," a weekly list of links relating to topics relevant to Lead developers (actual or aspiring) working with an internet-related product.
Many lead developers, tech lead, and staff engineers have their hands in many projects and influence many layers in their organizations. This publication aims to share thoughts and content relevant to such profiles.
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this week ...
We have kept things a bit short. The last few weeks have been busy for us with the conclusion of an infrastructure set up for a client. We will share more on this at a later date.
So this week it's about Ruby and Leadership. But even if you are not a Rubyist or a Lead in a team I'd suggest you check out the posts we have linked. It'd still be, at least, food for thought for your own cases.
On the ruby side
As with any other package management infrastructure piece, RubyGems needs to be as secure as possible. We have seen attack vectors using weaknesses of it over the years, so it's quite nice to see it push for the adoption of 2FA for the accounts of gem maintainers.
To better secure RubyGems, today we're introducing a new policy.
— RubyGems Status (@rubygems_status) June 13, 2022
- Popular gem maintainers will see prompts to enable multi-factor auth.
- Starting Aug 15, MFA will be enforced.
This move will help us build a safer community inline with other ecosystems.https://t.co/tCiSvzWZRL
AppSignal's blog also published a good post on Flipper, the feature switch for Ruby applications. Feature switches are a very good tool to have in your toolbox. It's also a great opportunity to remind everyone of Scientist. Paired together a feature switch and this great library can help you not only refactor but also build your features in a more scalable and reliable way.
Leading and managing
Twitter and LeadDev have continued to be a source of interesting content on those two topics.
First an interesting exchange between a few people about good practices and how to spread them in an organization.
Moving from a few isolated examples of engineering best practices towards organization wide adoption of best practices. That's the challenge. It's a great challenge to have and a great underpinning for creating a new engineering culture.
— Tom 💉💉 (@tomwillfixit) June 13, 2022
But there was also a thread from @rhein_wein about the difference in perception of productivity between managers and developers.
We've all heard about (and rolled our eyes at) the out-of-touch software engineering manager:
— Laura Tacho 🌮 (@rhein_wein) June 13, 2022
"Can we deliver faster by adding more people?"
"I want to see more PR activity."
But here's an interesting study on the definitions of productivity from managers and developers:
But there were also some great posts to read ...
One I liked is Nick Means take on "How to run a great retrospective" on LeadDev. Much has been said about retrospectives but this is a good overview of how it can go and what to get out of it.
Another one I found interesting is Dana Browlee post on Forbes "Great work-from-home leaders actually lead differently". It's based on an exchange with David Patcher, author of a book on the topic. The article itself is a good reminder that leading a remote team is best done differently than when we were all in the office. I'd add that there are actually bits of all this that should be picked and used by leaders not working remotely too.
Imfiny?
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