Product Excellence Best Practices

What are the components that help teams to build quality into their outcomes? The main goal is to create a baseline that developers could follow and be in a quality level that is well defined and measurable. The main parts to focus on are:

1. Testing
2. Code reviews
3. Static analysis
4. Health monitoring: availability, resilience, etc’.

Tests

Advertisements

Raspberry Pi As Security Camera With Motion Detection

It was a fun weekend project I did with my kids. We started with a new Pi Zero and in a few hours (of many ‘paths’ to nowhere) we got into the point of having a useful security camera. The useful part is when the camera sends you alerts (email or Telegram messages) when it detects movements.

We open the package and connected the Pi Zero to a USB power, a keyboard, a mouse and monitor. We cut a bit a corner by buying an SD card with NOOBS on it but it wasn’t working (nothing was coming up on the screen when we boot the Pi). So we downloaded a new version from Raspian Jessie 4.4 from NOOBS and install it. Now when we boot the Pi we got a new screen. We open the terminal and typed:

How to Be Happy Without Getting Lucky

A perfect spot for thinking and breathing

 

All the great ideas here are from @Naval
I just edit it so I could comeback and read it from time to time.

1. Seek wealth, not money or status.

Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep.
Money is how we transfer time and wealth.
Status is your place in the social hierarchy.‏

2. Understand that ethical wealth creation is possible.
If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.‏

3. Ignore people playing status games.
They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games.‏

Make Better Decisions

Thanks to @farnamstreet for these great points that he posted on Twitter. It reminded me of a good conversation I had with a friend about the ‘right’ decision and a ‘good’ decision.

A good decision is the best decision you can make based on the evidence at hand at the moment you need to decide. If it will be the ‘right’ one – only time can tell. Btw, it is good to remember that many decisions are reversible. With those types of decisions, you can use a light-weight process. You don’t have to live with the consequences for that long if you can change it (which is easy to say and hard to do). You should improve your skills to recognize quickly that a decision is wrong. When you become good at course correction, you will be able to ‘fail quickly’ and move forward fast. If you wish to get better and increase the odds to have good decisions that turn out on the right side, here is a list of rules to help with the process.

How to take a better decision?

Code Reviews Will Improve You

There are many options to improve your software quality. One of the most effective methods is to do code reviews with other developers.
Code reviews are as much a social interaction as a technical best practice. In a healthy engineering culture (egoless), team members engage their peers to improve the quality of their code and increase their productivity. Developers understand that the time they spend looking at a colleague’s code is repaid when other team members examine their own deliverables. These days, most of the companies (e.g. Facebook, Netflix, Google, Amazon, Uber) are embracing it, so it’s another sign that something is working well here.

Why Ask For A Peer Review?

1. The most basic reason is to find bugs.
   If you won’t ask for it, you will miss bugs in your code:
   a. Accidental errors – typos or mixing variables.
   b. Structural errors – dead code, logic or algorithm bugs, performance or architecture concerns. These are often much easier to spot for an external reviewers the see your work from their perspective.
2. You preventing from yourself a great way to learn and get better – Committers are motivated by the notion of a viewer who will look over the change request: the committer tends to clean up loose ends, consolidate TODOs, and generally improve the commit.
3. Your code is not as clear as you think it is nor its testability and readability.

Code reviews are very important not only for developers but also to product managers, test engineers, designers and others. In many cases, developers will be the first ones to see the benefits. It will allow them to move faster and with higher quality.

The Monty Hall Problem

The Monty Hall problem is a brain teaser loosely based on the American television game show “Let’s Make a Deal” and named after its original host, Monty Hall.

I wrote a little web app that show you what is the right choice with a simulator. It’s a bit hard to explain the correct solution as it’s going against ‘common’ sense.

Important Books That Are Delight To Read

There are around 130 million books around the world.

Let’s say that you can read 2 books a week. In a year, you will be able to read ~100 books and if you keep this pace for the next 80-90 years you have a chance to read ~9000 books which is only 0.007% from the total amount.

So a good question would be:

Which books would you choose to read?

I am collecting suggestions, so please feel free to share.

Btw, If you wish to understand why your kids are hooked on Fortnite? check The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins. I’m still amazed how Epic game (the company the behind Fortnite) took so many great ideas from these books and baked them into the game.

Want a few more that I really enjoyed?

• Wish to laugh?
  • Born a Crime, by Trevor Noah
  • Yes please! by Amy Poehler
• Think?
  • Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell
  • Where Good Ideas Come from, by Steven Johnson
• Learn about health and the cutting edge of our knowledge about cancer?
  • The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene: An Intimate History both by Mukherjee Siddhartha
• Learn (more) about great thinkers?
  • Einstein or Leonardo da Vinci or Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson
  • Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike, by Phil Knight
  • Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow and Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and 21 lessons for the 21st centery by Yuval Noah Harari