Interestings for Iterators Vol I, #1

First, this is a newsletter experiment. My sourdough starter is long dead and my exercise routine is solid. So that means it’s time for an attempt at a newsletter. This experiment won’t have a subscription feature just yet. But if this gets some traction, I’ll move in that direction.

Second, this will be a “link dump” style series. I’ll keep the rants and ramblings as normal, maybe with a link to them here. This series’ contents will be things that I would bring up during the Interestings section of our Standup.

Last, I’ve been looking for a term to use for those of us in the Software Products domain who believe in short feedback loops and improving our practices based on evidence. At Pivotal this started with Extreme Programming, and we added Lean Startup, then Balanced Team. But Pivotal is now part of (a wonderful and challenging) history. And these principles and practices are not exclusive to Pivotal (or its customers, clients, or follow-on entiries).

How might we refer to ourselves, then?

I propose Iterators.

Let’s see if it sticks.

With that aside, here are my Interestings for Iterators from the past week:

Essays & Posts

• Jason Fraser wrote My Job Hunt Strategy about re-thinking his job search using the principles from Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy/Bad Strategy. I found this a refreshing take on how to approach a problem all too many of us have right now.

Tools

Window Managers for Apple Silicon

If you’re a fan of keyboard-based window managers so that you can shortcut your way to moving all of your windows around, you may be sad. The Apple Silicon transition has rendered some of these tools useless. This comes up quarterly on the Pivotal Alumni Slack, so I’m sharing some of the solutions:

• ShiftIt’s - one of the moribund solutions - recommends to use Hammerspoon and a script
• Onsi Fakhouri forked a fork to give us Mosaic
• Phoenix is another one
• Personally, I was a big fan of Slate (untoched for 12 years!). Fertigt forked and recompiled it for arm-64 at Slate. There’s even an homebrew cask for it.
  • And here’s my config file for Slate

Experimentation Cheat Sheet & Template

John Cutler’s done it again with a straightforward experiment template. I’ve already used this twice this week!

Software Development

Yet Another CSS Reset & Starter

There are so very many of these out there. I’m a big fan of Holiday.css. Our fam at Initial Capacity have an HTML/CSS reset project called CSS Starter. It’s not just a great set of CSS defaults, it also has links to key CSS education and a set of patterns on how to grow your CSS sustainably and maintainably over time.

My favorite SOLID talk

When complex software problems come up, I almost always refer folks to the talk SOLID in the Wild from SpringOne Platform 2017. Pivots David, Mike, and Zoe knock out of the park with a real-world example utilizing SOLID principles to make software adapt. It’s very much in the spirit of Kent Beck’s “make the hard change easy, then make the easy change.” I shared this again this week and it saved someone about a week’s worth of work on a refactor.

Feedback

Thanks for reading! And thanks to Nat Bennett for the inspiration. Let me know what you think about this (see my about page).