Ari Koponen

100 tweets on "software developer productivity" for this year's @threadapalooza

I’m attending @ApidaysHelsinki today and have few copies of ”Build: Elements of an Effective Software Organization” with me. Come say hi, if you’re interested in engineering effectiveness or developer productivy! #apidaysHelsinki @APIdaysGlobal

@jorilallo @teej_m I guess the upside here is that now probably thousands of software engineers more know the dangers of "TRUNCATE TABLE <new_table> CASCADE;" After next Halloween, even more.

@teej_m I’ll be TRUNCATE CASCADE for Halloween this year

I guess I've seen too many production outages, I saw this one coming a mile away

@outoilkka We would love to do one! Not sure yet, though, if there’s enough demand for one. We’d prefer a high-quality human narration for the book so it’s a great listening experience.

@APKoponen Have you considered an audiobook? If the book was available through Audible I'd by within a heartbeat. I'll probably get the print one anyway, but would love an audio version.

The 1st edition of the book ran out of print in a few days. The second edition is out in print and on Kindle! Really proud of how this turned out. This gem is the result of hours of feedback, editing and discussions. 👏

@vnglst Post to TikTok with text ”Which one will win? 🤔” and get a bazillion views.

Can’t believe how popular this is. Makes me wonder why that is?

@GeorgeMayer You can Google "s3 compatible cloud storage" and find dozens of vendors (big and small) doing the same thing. It's the de facto industry standard.

@GeorgeMayer IBM ships modified versions "based on the official AWS S3 API SDKs" (cloud.ibm.com/docs/cloud-obj…) Oracle piggy backs: "You can use existing S3 tools (for example, SDK clients)" (docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/rel…) DigitalOcean piggy backs:(docs.digitalocean.com/products/space…)

It's kind of hilarious/genius that Cloudflare made R2 SO S3-compatible that they literally just recommend using the aws SDK. No need to write their own!

@GeorgeMayer @StatisticsFTW There's a handy free MacOS GUI for it by @sindresorhus called Aiko (sindresorhus.com/aiko)

@StatisticsFTW github.com/openai/whisper whisper japanese.wav --language Japanese --task translate

What is the least effort way to translate audio from one language to another?

@jdnoc I most of the time enjoy your content here, but feel that this was an unnecessary dunk.

This is what happens when you do everything in service of yourself instead of service of others.

@jorilallo All the "tsemppi" to everyone in the team!

I was woken up last night at 3am with a Pagerduty message "data is being deleted". This is a nightmare situation for any engineer or founder. Team is working hard on disaster recovery caused by a bad migration, please bear with us. Post-mortem to follow x.com/linear/status/…

@GeorgeMayer @IslamicZionist @Carnage4Life Most def not a meta only phenomena. We’ve talked to hundreds of engineering orgs (small, large, huge) on how they approach engineering performance reviews and there exists a whole group of companies that focus on individuals.

@IslamicZionist @Carnage4Life I think it’s pronounced at meta, but I think it exists in lots of lots of places. And I guess I wouldn’t yet say the metaverse failed or that’s the reason…. though both could be true with the test of time

@joebell_ Tervetuloa uudestaan!

It happened again

@matiaslespiau This resonated with me. Especially the last paragraph.

Some thoughts on my experience regarding work-life balance.

@GeorgeMayer No insider knowledge, but their engineering level promotions seem to be quite big project/impact centric. Peer/manager feedback matters so I guess the amount psychologican safety plays a role depends on how much the surrounding environment values it.

@APKoponen Did they impact perf reviews at google?

One of the biggest reasons an organization isn't innovative is that managers looks to parse out who did what on a project. This causes ownership anxiety and hoarding behavior, especially for ideas. But an individual can only have the start of a good idea. It takes a team to make it whole. So, most ideas die. Managers think they're doing the right thing—being fair and giving credit where credit is due. But it creates a toxic culture that snuffs out ideas before they even break the soil. The side effect (ideas dying) is actually a counterfactual, which makes it hard to measure or even see. It's not a strict tradeoff or measurement of opportunity cost. There's no regret baked in ("Oh we should have done that") because the idea died—*poof*—in someone's head. A strong performance culture needs to recognize that when you look back at the best ideas, it's actually hard to remember who came up with which parts, because they had so many contributions and evolved so much over time. And if a team produces great things based on creative ideas, there should be broad-based recognition. I don't know how to change this type of culture. But if you feel like your organization is lacking innovation, perhaps consider the performance incentives that are baked in.

@jimbimbop @GeorgeMayer You always do, but there's a major difference if the focus is on individuals or in team/organization performance.

@APKoponen @GeorgeMayer How do you not evaluate individual performance when evaluating individuals?

7 principles + 9 ways I've learned to improve how you ship software First the 7 principles: 1. Speed When it comes to deploys speed is safety, and small is speed. The speed of shipping has massive compounding effects. If your deploy takes hours, you’re going to want to make damn sure there are no bugs, because if you find a critical bug right after a deploy goes live, then you have to wait another couple hours for your fix to go live.

@flybayer This 💯! In so many team everyone mostly work on separate projects. For a larger teams you can have more than one project, but need make sure your WIP limit low enough that people actually collaborate.

Tactic 8. Work as a team Many teams work as individuals instead of as a team. This is why the Eagles lost the playoff game last week. The entire team unit should be working all together on a single project at a time. This results in a better product with less bugs.

@amix3k This is also driven by the Twitter algo that drives engagement for controversial takes.

I am unsure if I only feel this way, but the quality of content has dropped a lot since people began monetizing their knowledge. Things were better when people shared because they had something insightful to say. And things are getting even worse with AI-assisted content. It's easy to produce a lot of content that sounds good but isn't very novel or insightful.