developerjackHello there and welcome to 2018! I am your weekly blogger and this week I have some thought provoking material to kick off your 2018 planning.
Shuffles papers on desk and waits for the news headlines to roll.
Yes this week we’re back to the keyboard and that means its time for The Weekly once more! Over the break you might have noticed my post about releasing software during holidays or my rant on Twitter about red-button-mongering. I also got to play a lot with Python+Flask and VueJS with an exciting side project I might release soon. You know, if I finish it =D
As we kick off the new year I also want to highlight that I’m volunteering my time for anyone that needs to remove gendered relationships from their product!
Engineering and product teams: if you have to update your software to get genders and titles right for #marriageequality in #Australia, I volunteer my time to help, coach and mentor!
— Jack Skinner'; — (@developerjack) November 16, 2017
DMs open! Reach out! Say hi! Let me help you!
RT for reach?
Please be warmly invited to reach out!
And onwards to this week’s links! I have four interesting reads that I hope will kick off your thought process for 2018 whether it be product strategy, open source contribution or your approaching to testing and delivering high quality software.
Announcing a more balanced Proprietary Information and Assignment Agreement
This is an excellent read and an exciting step forward for the ways that large corporate employers can support and encourage their employees to contribute to open source in meaningful and sustainable ways. Kudos Gitlab!
Read the post.Write tests. Not too many. Mostly integration.
If you’re thinking about your testing strategy in 2018 this post hits the mark for me. Especially when building services or capabilities as APIs the really important thing is that you maintain and ensure your contract to consumers. Integration tests help you ensure that the interactions between components do what they’re meant to do!
Read the post.How GitLab switched to Headless Chrome for testing
What I love about this post is not just the tech but the approach to replacing part of GitLab’s testing stack. The value they derived was not so much performance (though anecdotal calculations show a 2% boost) but more about the accuracy and tooling involved. Well worth the read if you’re doing any browser testing in the year ahead!
Read the post.Google maps moat
A fascinating dive into the evolution of Google Maps (and its ‘competitor’ Apple Maps). This ones a long one with lots of pretty screenshots exploring how Google Maps has, over the years, taken advantage of some fascinating satellite imagery, user data etc. etc. to build incredibly subtle but useful features into its maps. It also brings to light the sheer-dumb-luck (or more likely, very clever strategy) of planning the data source from street view into crafting useful map visuals. How far forward is your product team planning features?
Read the post.And so welcome back, and cheers [raises glass] to the year ahead!
@developerjack
