When I ask ask people about their approach to continuous integration, I often hear a response like “yes of course, we have CI, we use…”. When I ask people about doing continuous integration I often hear “that wouldn’t work for us…” It seems the practice of continuous integration is still quite extreme. It’s hard, takes… Read more »
Posts By: benji
Learning from Pain
Pain is something we generally try to avoid; pain is unpleasant, but it also serves an important purpose. Acute pain can be feedback that we need to avoid doing something harmful to our body, or protect something while it heals. Pain helps us remember the cause of injuries and adapt our behaviour to avoid a… Read more »
The unsung upsides of staying put
This week will be my last at Unruly; I’ll be moving on just shy of nine years from when I joined a very different company at the start of an enthralling journey. Unruly’s grown from around a dozen people when I joined to hundreds, with the tech team growing proportionally. Team growth driven by needs… Read more »
Hack Days; Removing the Rules
At Unruly we have a quarterly whole-company hack day that we call Oneruly day. Hackdays allow the whole company to focus on one thing for a day. Unlike our 20% time, which is time for individuals to work on what is most important to them, Hackdays are time for everyone to rally around a common… Read more »
End to End Tests
End to end automated tests written with Webdriver have a reputation for being slow, unreliable (failing for spurious reasons), and brittle (breaking with any change). So much so that many recommend not using them. They can become a maintenance burden, making it harder, rather than easier, to make changes to the user interface. However, these… Read more »
Representing the Impractical and Impossible with JDK 10 “var”
Having benefited from “var” for many years when writing c#, I’m delighted that Java is at last getting support for local variable type inference in JDK 10. From JDK 10 instead of saying ArrayList<String> foo = new ArrayList<String>();ArrayList<String> foo = new ArrayList<String>(); we can say var foo = new ArrayList<String>();var foo = new ArrayList<String>(); and… Read more »
Gold Cards
How does your team prioritise work? Who gets to decide what is most important? What would happen if each team member just worked on what they felt like? I’ve had the opportunity to observe an experiment: over the past 8 years at Unruly, developers have had 20% of their time to work on whatever they… Read more »
Why I Strive to be a 0.1x Engineer
There has been more discussion recently on the concept of a “10x engineer”. 10x engineers are, (from Quora) “the top tier of engineers that are 10x more productive than the average” Productivity I have observed that some people are able to get 10 times more done than me. However, I’d argue that individual productivity is… Read more »
Team Efficiency is Irrelevant
The most common reaction I hear when I tell people about mob programming (or even paired programing) is “How can that possibly be efficient?”, sometimes phrased as “How can you justify that to management?” or “How productive are you?” I think that efficiency in terms of “How much stuff can we get done in a… Read more »
Optionally typechecked StateMachines
Many things can be modelled as finite state machines. Particularly things where you’d naturally use “state” in the name e.g. the current state of an order, or delivery status. We often model these as enums. enum OrderStatus { Pending, CheckingOut, Purchased, Shipped, Cancelled, Delivered, Failed, Refunded }enum OrderStatus { Pending, CheckingOut, Purchased, Shipped, Cancelled, Delivered,… Read more »