31 May – Recommended Reading

May 31, 2011

A few articles to provide some insight into how others ‘do it’ and spur discussion within your team:

Quora : What key benefits did Twitter and Facebook uncover in crowdsourcing their translations?

While specific to Twitter and Facebook this Q&A on Quora includes further information on Atlassian Translations. Great insight is provided by Matt and Laura at Twitter as well. I have to admit, looking at the front-end experience of the Twitter Translation Centre leaves me wanting – wanting more for Atlassian Translations. We’ll need to get our act together and move back to the front-end after this stint on integration with the products.

Continuous Deployment is no Holy Grail – Jim Bird, May 2011

The other side to the continuous deployment argument which was made by John Wedgwood in my last post. In this article Jim points out the difficult aspects of continuous deployment. While I don’t yet have the evidence to back up this assertion I believe that many of the concerns Jim has can be overcome by automated testing – at least that is what I have heard second-hand from customers. More investigation on my part necessary.

Revenue, Personified – Cindy Alvarez, April 2011

Yes, another article from Cindy. I like her writing style and she selects great subjects to write about! In this article Cindy suggests questions you should be asking, as a product manager, about where your revenue comes from.

Midnight deploys are for idiots – Benjamin Pollack, March 2011

“Weekend deployments are for chumps.” A good read on why you should deploy mid-week. Better yet, deploy small pieces of work throughout the day to your customers so that you can quickly roll forward (not back) when any issues arise. I know a few people this has bitten.

Tracking slow requests with Dogslow – Erik van Zijst, May 2011

Very cool from a technical perspective. I love the analysis here. Erik digs into why Bitbucket was running slow by building an automated tool. This just reinforces the devops and continuous deployment culture that is developing within Atlassian – we want to know what is going on, we want it to be automated, and we want to smash any bugs on the head once and for all. On another note, my colleague Alex is picking up TDD and seems to be warming to it (after initial hesitation) which is awesome!

How to Scale a Development Team – Adam Wiggins, April 2011

Adam talks about the growth of the engineering team within Heroku, a PaaS (Platform as a Service) provider. My take away, if you are a startup you want to ensure you don’t get killed by indigestion.