Within organizational debt, there is a volatile subset most likely to come abruptly due, and I call that subset organizational risk. Some good examples might be a toxic team culture, a toilsome fire drill, or a struggling leader. These problems bubble up from your peers, skip-level one-on-ones, and organizational health surveys. If you care and are listening, these are hard to miss. But they are slow to fix. And, oh, do they accumulate!...
However, the real productivity killer is not system rewrites but the migrations that follow those rewrites. Poorly designed migrations expand the consequences of this rewrite loop from the individual teams supporting the systems to the entire surrounding organization. If each migration takes a week, each team is eight engineers, and you’re doing four migrations a year, then you’re losing about 1 percent of your company’s total productivity. If each of those migrations takes closer to a month, or if they are only possible for your small cadre of trained engineers—whose time is already tightly contended for—then the impact becomes far more pronounced....
A function-oriented structure in which firms have “vertical” groupings such as Marketing, Finance, Operations, R&D, or Customer Service. Each function has a specialty, and these specialties are critical to the performance of the firm. This kind of structure is effective when the organization’s product lines are fairly narrow or serve defined market areas. The Product Manager’s Survival Guide. And now for product-oriented structures: A** product-oriented **structure is commonly used by midsize to larger firms that are divided into product groups, product lines, or even product divisions....
Once in a while, I get lucky being asked to revive some legacy client project, that needs massive upgrades. Normally, the upgrade goes fine, meeting all required upgrades, making sure all the functionality is in place. But this time, the project was so outdated that the packages listed in composer dependencies didn’t just get into the archive. They were moved to a different repository, then closed down, and then mirrored by another developer....
Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress and the founder of Automattic, joins Basecamp co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson for a spirited debate about tech monopolies, power in open-source communities, and how to be good stewards of the modern web that they helped build. Listen on Rework.fm
If you’re still not convinced by this, there’s a more details version of it here.
This talk goes back to 2007, but still valid. Especially in this hype moment of Headless CMS apps popping up every single day, providing its own vision of Content Delivery API’s.
Great article recently published by Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal project, describing the balance of makers and takers in open source community: Small Open Source communities can rely on volunteers and self-governance, but as Open Source communities grow, their governance model most likely needs to be reformed so the project can be maintained more easily. There are three models for scaling and sustaining Open Source projects: self-governance, privatization, and centralization. All three models aim to reduce coordination failures, but require Open Source communities to embrace forms of monitoring, rewards and sanctions....
Honeypot filmed a great documentary on Ember.js and the story of its development. Brings up so many good memories from 2016. Back then, I was taking up by an ambitious task of re-writing the checkout service of the company I used work in, from plain PHP with monstrous AJAX spaghetti code, to something more stable, and consistent. Seeing a pure MVC architecture in JS framework was a real surprise for me, as most of the codebase I faced back then, didn’t have any structure....