Category: Resources

My Reading List @KanDDDinsky

Accelerate - Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations

Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, Gene Kim, Jez Humble

This book was referenced to in a lot of talks, mostly with the same phrase “hey folks, you have to read this!”

Domain Modeling Made Functional by Scott Wlaschin

The book was called as the only real currently published reference work for DDD for functional programming.

More books and videos to find on fsharpforfunandprofit

Functional Core, Imperative Shell by Gary Bernhard – a talk

The comments on this tweet are telling me, watching this video is long overdue …

37 Things One Architect Knows About IT Transformation by Gregor Hohpe

The name @ghohpe was also mentioned a few times at @KanDDDinsky

Domain Storytelling

A Collaborative Modeling Method

by Stefan Hofer and Henning Schwentner

Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us by Daniel H Pink

There is also a TLDR-Version: a talk on vimeo

Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

This book was recommended by @weltraumpirat after our short discussion about how broken or industry is. Thank you Tobias! I’m afraid, the book will give me no happy ending.

UPDATE:

It is not a take-away from KanDDDinsky but still a must have book (thank you Thomas): The Phoenix Project

Base your decisions on heuristics and not on gut feeling

As a developer we tackle very often problems which can be solved in various ways. It is ok not to know how to solve a problem. The real question is: how to decide which way to go 😯

In this situations often I rather have a feeling as a concrete logical reason for my decisions. This gut feelings are in most cases correct – but this fact doesn’t help me if I want to discuss it with others. It is not enough to KNOW something. If you are not a nerd from the 80’s (working alone in a den) it is crucial to be able to formulate and explain and share your thoughts leading to those decisions.

Finally I found a solution for this problem as I saw the session of Mathias Verraes about Design Heuristics held by the KanDDDinsky.

The biggest take away seems to be a no-brainer but it makes a huge difference: formulate and visualize your heuristics so that you can talk about concrete ideas instead of having to memorize everything what was said – or what you think it was said.

Using this methodology …

  • … unfounded opinions like “I think this is good and this is bad” won’t be discussed. The question is, why is something good or bad.
  • … loop backs to the same subjects are avoided (to something already discussed)
  • … the participants can see all criteria at once
  • … the participants can weight the heuristics and so to find the probably best solution

What is necessary for this method? Actually nothing but a whiteboard and/or some stickies. And maybe to take some time beforehand to list your design heuristics. These are mine (for now):

  • Is this a solution for my problem?
  • Do I have to build it or can I buy it?
  • Can it be rolled out without breaking neither my features as everything else out of my control?
  • Breaks any architecture rules, any clean code rules? Do I have a valid reason to break these rules?
  • Can lead to security leaks?
  • Is it over engineered?
  • Is it much to simple, does it feel like a short cut?
  • If it is a short cut, can be corrected in the near future without having to throw away everything? = Is my short cut implemented driving my code in the right direction, but in more shallow way?
  • Does this solution introduce a new stack = a new unknown complexity?
  • Is it fast enough (for now and the near future)?
  • … to be continued 🙂

The video for the talk can be found here. It was a workshop disguised as a talk (thanks again Mathias!!), we could have have continued for another hour if it weren’t for the cold beer waiting 🙂