Maximum productivity when you are the bottleneck

Scenarios that make you scarce

Software development productivity is the ratio of desirable high-quality software to money spent. With this meaning, productivity is aligned with quality and effectiveness: it only counts creating “the right software” and encompasses creating “the software right”. Productivity is more important than efficiency (the lack of waste), as occasionally a bit of inefficiency pays off.

In the quest for some combination of these values, project management methodologies or practitioners generally assume that members of a team have approximately similar scarcity/availability/cost. But sometimes, you may find yourself more scarce than a group you are working with:

  • You are leading at a high “fan-out” – one person leading a team of many.
  • You are leading a team expected (for good reasons or bad) to expand or turn over significantly.
  • You are much more senior than the rest of your team.
  • You are in an expensive city or country, other team members are in a less expensive locale.
  • You are a “hired gun” consultant, brought in at great cost, expected to “move the needle”.
  • You are a professional developer responsible for mentoring, teaching, and getting results from a group of interns.
  • You have a communication advantage with the customers of a product or project; perhaps you speak the customer’s language more fluently than others on your team.
  • You are the only team member with extensive and relevant experience to the problem at hand.
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Angular dependency injection: why?

At work we teach and consult on various topics, notably (for this post) Angular. We are often asked why Angular has and heavily uses dependency injection. Here are my answers to this question; I haven’t had a chance to compare notes with the rest of our Angular expert team, so here it is, on my personal blog. (However, special thanks to Paul Spears, who helped clarify these ideas.)

Dependency injection has a considerable complexity cost, so it’s important to have good reasons to add this complexity to a framework or application. There are an unlimited number of potential features and patterns to follow, so the default for any particular feature or pattern must be “no”. Moreover, popular Angular alternatives (like React) thrive without a dependency injection system, constituting an “existence proof” that it is not a necessity, but rather a choice.

Continue reading “Angular dependency injection: why?”

Populate your issue tracker at scale

Sometimes when working on a project at work, we find out about a pile of features or changes needed. This can happen at the beginning of a project, at the start of the major initiative, after deploying a project (which triggers much user feedback), etc. Sometimes we have so much to absorb and divvy up into issue tracker items, that the logistics of doing so are painful.

Just thinking through and writing down 50-100 issues (or more!) is too tedious for one person to get through quickly. To divide up this work (of describing a bunch of issues in enough depth someone could work on them), I’ve come up with the following approach.

First, I jot down a list of all the areas of the system where there are new issues to enter. This forms an outline of areas that have issues, I don’t even attempt to make an entry for every likely issue.

Second, I record one or more videos, showing the screen of the system I want to add issues for, alternating back and forth with code. As I go, I describe each problem/opportunity/fix, that should become an issue. Depending on whether the new issues are closely related to existing ones, sometimes this includes bringing up the issue tracker (Jira, etc) also, talking through existing items about work remaining on them.  Sometimes something that first seems like a new issue, is really just a refinement of the success criteria of an already known issue.

Having spent potentially quite a while just describing issues (there have been times when this goes on for over an hour), I hand over the recording(s) to a relatively new person on the team, who will go through and translate this rapid-fire description into a set of items. Typically it’s fastest for the person to do that not by directly entering the items, but by just typing the candidate issues into a document. (If the list is big enough, it can pay off to have a transcriber handle the first pass – turn the words from the video/audio, into text.)

Finally, that initial rough list of candidate issue, goes to the project leader(s) of the project in question, to clean up, refine, review, approve. Then someone copies the approved text into the issue tracker.

Admittedly this is not a complex process, hardly worthy of a blog post. But someone once asked me how we successfully enter so much detail into so many items on complex projects – and here is the answer. Entering all that really does pay off. It is much more plausible to delegate work if you have described it as thoroughly as you can.

Adjust base href via a NPM package.json scripts

Suppose you wanted to adjust the base HREF in an index.html file using a regular expression, as part of a build process you are cobbling together using NPM scripts. How could you do that? Here’s one answer, though this only works if the sed command line tool is available (as it will be almost always on Linux or Mac, and only if you install it on Windows):

"add-base-url": "sed -i.bak -e 's/\\\"\\\/\\\"/\"\\\/some-base-url-here\"/' dist/index.html",

Unfortunately, I have begged a question. (In the traditional sense and that I assumed an answer to a question, not the modern repurposed thing of the phrase). Is it actually a good idea to use the combination of a regular expression and a script written in a JSON file, to do anything at all?

Looking at the multiple levels of \\/\/\/\\\///\// escaping above, I think the answer to this question is clearly no. It would be better to use some other means for this adjustment. On other projects we have done the same manipulation using a tool that manipulates the HTML structure. It is more verbose but vastly easier to understand.

(Incidentally, I used to do things somewhat like the above to adjust the base URLs for Angular applications.   This is not necessary anymore if using Angular CLI  – it has an option built in, –base-href.)

 

 

TypeScript as ES2015/ES2016+ compiler

I frequently encounter packages on NPM which bring in Babel to compile ES2015/2016+ down to older JavaScript suitable for a wider range of browsers. Babel is a very effective tool for this, it has been around quite a long time, and is highly configurable and flexible in future ready. It has an amazing community and reputation.

But – it is also surprisingly “heavy” in its impact on your tools installation. A typical Babel installation with a typical set of plug-ins can easily bring in 20,000 or more files, spread over hundreds of transitive dependency packages. On a huge project this might not be noticed, but on a small or medium project it can easily be the largest dependency.

Are large NPM dependency trees a problem? Theoretically no, but practically they have some downsides. Dependencies bring risk, and lots of dependencies inevitably bring more risk. If you depend transitively on hundreds more packages, your project is more vulnerable to the sort of NPM vagaries that happen from time to time (the most famous being left-pad), your project is more inclined to fall behind current versions, and most annoyingly in corporate settings, that long list of plugins and transitive dependencies is more likely to cause heartburn among lawyers who evaluate licenses.

There is an easy way to ease this problem, but it involves a minor update to one’s thinkinh. Find the spot in your mind where you may think:

“the TypeScript compiler is a tool for compiling TypeScript code to JavaScript and type checking it”.

The actual truth in 2017 is:

The TypeScript compiler is an excellent, well supported, frequently-updated general-purpose tool very suitable for non-TypeScript users. It does a great job compiling a broad array of standards-path ES2015/16/+ features down to ES2015 or ES5. It fits in well with overall project build tooling. It is completely suitable to use the TypeScript compiler on a non-TypeScript project for this purpose.

The TypeScript compiler has several substantial practical benefits over Babel:

  • It is a single dependency with no transitive dependencies.
  • Usually faster compilation.
  • It is developed by a team at Microsoft, who do a great job grinding away at the boring aspects of this work, shipping a long series of updates which keep fixing bugs and adding features.
  • It installs quickly and has far fewer failure modes in installation (because of no transitive dependencies).
  • Just one open source license to review (no transitive dependencies)… from a company that your company probably already buys a lot of stuff from anyway.
  • Just one version to update, and one configuration file to tweak which features you are using.
  • WebPack and other plug-ins available, quite analogous to Babel.

As of 2017, my recommendation is to consider TypeScript as the default solution for compiling ES2015/16+ code in non-TypeScript projects, and use Babel as a fallback if your project needs cutting-edge features that are (intentionally) not yet in TypeScript.

Cycle JS – example application and video tour

I recently learned a lot about CycleJS, which had been recommended to me in the category “you probably won’t use this for your day job right now, but you will learn a lot by looking”. And indeed, it has turned out to be the case. Cycle can be thought of as an answer to the question “what if we only had Observables and virtual DOM ? Would that be enough to build applications?” It appears to me that the answer is yes, though the tooling is not really all that complete yet.

Along the way I wrote a small example application and recorded a series of short videos (below) explaining some of the things I learned along the way, how to use various Cycle features, and especially about interesting points of comparison between Cycle and Angular and React.

These videos are not an introduction to Cycle, nor do they replace the documentation. Rather the idea is to give a flavor of how things work in Cycle from an application developer point of view, compare and contrast with other approaches, and point out why some of the ideas are quite valuable even if initially not obvious.

As I write this, have recorded four videos and made it about 70% of the way through the example application, talking through how it works and why. Questions and suggestions are much appreciated, probably the best place to put those is in the issue tracker of the example application linked above.