A bit of a catch-up issue of the Friday Links. Full of urbanism, randomness, a few of 2020 reviews and the usual engineering management. Relatively few podcast were released over the holidays. I managed to catch up with my back-log (for a while). Management What are our core values and practices for building software? - cool summary about Thoughtsworks engineering values. I think they probably apply to a lot of companies ...
You would think a global pandemic would be good for your reading habit. This doesn’t seem to be the case for me. I am not sure where the time I spent on commute went, but definitely not towards some good use. This list is kind of in order, but also grouped by author and series. Most of the books are easy airport reads, with thrillers and some sci-fi. ...
I can’t remember when I started to listen to podcasts. I am sure I was not an early adopter. It might have been around 2004 using iPodder on Linux with the first iPod and later an iPod Shuffle. Over the years I used various tools and devices to download podcasts and now have settled on Pocket Casts on Android. It has nice sync functionality between multiple devices and a useful web interface too. The web app is also useful to pull up the recently starred episodes for my Friday Links. ...
I used to really hate meetings. As a developer they seem to just get into the way of doing real work. You sit in a room with other people who are probably thinking the same thing and you are itching to get back to your desk and do “real work”. But at some point you specialise, teams grow and you need some way to sync up. Suddenly you realise that meetings are where some decisions are made and you want to join as many as possible. ...
I heard of the Lead Dev conference series some time at the end of the last year. There are not many conferences that focus on engineering leaders, most of the technology conferences are focused on specific technologies, methodologies or the business side. It was too late for the Berlin 2019 conference, so I set my eyes on either the London or Berlin 2020 conference. In the end I decided against London, because I wanted to avoid short plane trips as much as possible and staying longer in London also wasn’t an option. ...