Interestings for Iterators Vol I, #4
I was “off” last week as I was at RailsConf 2024 in Detroit with several hundred other Rubyists on Rails. It was a fun and interesting time. I thought the program committee did an exceptional job this year with the technical topics and inspirational keynotes. Having a day that was just workshops and OSS project hacking was genius. I hope to see this continue at RubyConf and other conferences in the future.
Attendees have been posting their reflections all week - check ruby.social - and the talks should be up in a month or so. I’ll be linking to my favorites then.
Great job, team! And thanks!
Codex Updates and Highlights
Not much new added to the Pivotal Alumni Codex in the past couple of weeks. Instead, here’s a highlight!
This week I’m going to point to the Labs Practices site, and directory of open-sourced-resources that Pivotal Labs, and VMware Tanzu Labs gathered over the years for our clients. This is worth bookmarking for facilitation guides, technique descriptions, and learning paths.
In The Wild
How Slack Automates Deploys H/T to Josh Aresty for pointing me at this. It’s a good story about how Slack went from a very manual to a very automated deploy system. This felt very familiar to my recent work, yet I’ve got a few new techniques to try when advising a release team again.
BackgroundMusic for MacOS A new-to-me, free homebrew-installable, audio utility. Best reason to install it: the virtual microphone that means you can use ScreenRecorder to get system audio in your video. Best reasons to keep it: independent, relative volume controls for open apps and auto-muting of music when you move to a video call.
20 Things I’ve Learned as a Systems (Over) Thinker by John Cutler. Another winner from John. As I said when I re-shared this on LinkedIn - “It me.”
A Radical Enterprise Quick Start Guide for Business Leaders A good jumping off point before you dive into Matt Parker’s book A Radical Enterprise. Which reminds me a bit of…
Doing Agile Right by Darrell Rigby, Sarah Elk , and Steve Berez. When this book came out, I attended a Q&A with one of the authors and was prepared to be constructively confrontational. My experience with management consultants and “Agile Transformations” was…not great. But what I learned from Sarah’s answers, and this book - much like Matt Parker’s book above - is that the Agile Software Manifesto has reflections everywhere. And it’s a systems-thinking mindset, a desire to shrink feedback loops, and reminder that you’re working with people that can help any project move faster with less waste.
Better Together! Jason Fraser posted about Move Fast and how it’s a solid companion to his and Janice Fraser’s book [Farther Faster]. I’m adding Move Fast to my queue.
Let me know if you’re enjoying these. Feedback is much appreciated. My social links are above.