Posts Tagged ‘workskills’
[NDCOslo2024] Get Old, Go Slow, Write Code! – Tobias Modig
In the inexorable march toward maturity within the software realm, where velocity often eclipses wisdom, Tobias Modig, a veteran developer and agile enthusiast, delivers a defiant ode to senescence and serenity. With decades of debugging and deployment under his belt, Tobias dismantles the dread of obsolescence, championing the virtues of deliberate deliberation over frenetic fervor. His manifesto, infused with humor and historical homage, reframes aging as an asset, urging seasoned coders to linger in their craft, cultivating depth that outlasts the dash of youth.
Tobias sets the stage with three audacious aims: extol the merits of maturation, extol the elegance of unhurried execution, and exhort eternal engagement with the keyboard. He concedes the tribulations of tenure—framework flux, fledgling fluency—yet counters with conviction: the elder’s edge lies in equanimity, a measured mastery that millennials might mistake for malaise. Drawing from personal peregrinations, Tobias recounts races against rookies, where haste harvested hazards, while patience polished prowess.
Embracing Maturity: The Gifts of Graying Grace
Aging, Tobias asserts, accrues acuity: accumulated anecdotes afford anticipation of anomalies, sparing the squad from snafus. He invokes the Peter Principle’s peril—that of ascending to incompetence—warning against the siren song of supervisory seclusion. Developers, he declares, thrive in trenches, where tactile troubleshooting trumps theoretical tenure. His anecdote: a mid-career pivot to management, marred by monotony, until a return to roots reignited rapture.
Deliberation distinguishes the doyenne: novices navigate novelties nimbly, yet veterans vet viability, averting avoidable adventures. Tobias’s tenet: slowness safeguards sustainability, yielding code that’s not just correct but crafted with care, comprehensible to cohorts centuries hence.
Deliberate Deliberation: The Delights of Dawdling Development
Haste, Tobias laments, harbors hubris: crammed calendars court catastrophe, as unforeseen exigencies eclipse equilibrium. He likens laden ledgers to jammed junctions—a single snag spawns stalemates. His remedy: infuse interstices—unallocated intervals for introspection, ideation, or intercession—transforming tension into tranquility.
This tempo tempers teams: slack spaces spawn serendipity, where neighboring novices nurture under seasoned scrutiny, sans overtime’s overhang. Tobias’s triumph: a project propelled by pauses, where prototypes pondered yielded paradigms that persisted, proving premeditation’s primacy.
Perpetual Pursuit: Coding as Continuum
Tobias’s triad culminates in commitment: code ceaselessly, defying the drift to desks. He bewails the “developer lifecycle”—from coder to curator to custodian—as a cul-de-sac of creativity. His exhortation: evade elevation, or equilibrate it with engagements that endure—pairing, mentoring, moonlighting.
His horizon: harness hoariness as hegemony, letting longevity lead, as the world whirls while wisdom waits.
Links:
[NDCOslo2024] Smarter, Not Harder: Scaling Without Burning Out in an Always-More Landscape – Marion Løken
Amid the relentless crescendo of expectations—ever-expanding portfolios, dwindling headcounts—Marion Løken, a product manager at FINN.no, chronicles a odyssey of astute adaptation. As FINN merged with Nordic kin like Blocket and DBA, Marion’s lean cadre of four developers and a designer scaled offerings from Norwegian dealer portals to pan-Nordic private and financial forays, all while safeguarding sanity. Her manifesto: intelligence over intensity, leveraging toolchains and toolboxes to transmute toil into triumph, ensuring expansion exhilarates rather than exhausts.
Marion’s narrative unfolds against FINN’s tectonic shift: from solitary insight apps to embedded analytics across platforms, reinventing for diverse demographics. This “more with less” maelstrom, she concedes, could crush spirits, yet a smarter ethos—component curation, documentation dynamism—drove delight. By embracing mainstream stacks like Kotlin and Spring, augmented by FINN’s Podium toggles, her team doubled revenues annually, sans burnout’s bite.
Cultivating Resilience: Buffers Against Overload
Stress, Marion posits, stems from workload, control, and reward imbalances. Her buffers: processes fortify all facets—planning preempts panic, frequent releases reclaim rhythm. Culture cascades calm: transparent retrospectives temper tensions, fostering feedback loops that affirm agency.
Tools tame tasks: reusable libraries liberate from reinvention, Swagger’s specs streamline specs. Marion’s metric: fun’s stability, tracked longitudinally, underscores sustainability’s success. Her heuristic: under duress, deliberate—rethink routines, not redouble efforts.
Toolbox Transformation: From Niche to Nimble
FINN’s evolution eschewed esoterica for ubiquity: Kotlin supplanted Kotlin Multiplatform, OpenAPI supplanted bespoke bindings. Marion marvels at Podium’s prowess—feature flags flipping functionalities fleetly—enabling A/B artistry without architectural upheaval. Documentation, once dormant, danced dynamically via auto-generated APIs, accelerating assimilation for newcomers.
This pivot propelled progress: a pricing tool, inherited and iterated, burgeoned from parity to prowess, yielding fiscal fruits. Marion’s mantra: mainstream multiplicity multiplies might, marrying maturity with maneuverability.
Embedding Efficiency: Innovation Amid Integration
Embedding insights into journeys demanded deft design: component catalogs curbed custom code, promoting parity across portals. Marion’s lean legion—four coders, one crafter—conquered complexity through collaboration, cross-pollinating with Nordic nests.
Her horizon: stress as signal, prompting smarter strides. By buffering buffers, teams transcend thresholds, turning “always more” into ample achievement.
Links:
[NDCOslo2024] Domain-Driven Design in Practice: How to Draw Your Domain Boundaries IRL – Vilde Opsal
In the dynamic crucible of organizational transformation, where business and technology converge, Vilde Opsal, an architect at FINN.no, narrates a saga of redrawing domain boundaries amidst a Nordic merger. As FINN.no and Schibsted Nordic Marketplaces shifted from horizontal silos to vertical units, Vilde orchestrated a domain-driven design (DDD) odyssey, harmonizing legacy maps with new strategies. Her case study, vibrant with real-world trials, illuminates how to craft domain boundaries that evolve with stakeholders, blending art, agility, and audience empathy.
Vilde frames her talk as a TV show, casting herself as the architect alongside product leads, developers, and a “big boss.” FINN.no’s reorganization—merging four marketplaces into a Nordic entity—demanded a new domain map to support independent verticals. Her mission: align historical domains, new teams, and strategic shifts, ensuring boundaries serve both immediate needs and long-term visions.
Crafting the Canvas: Principles of Domain-Driven Design
DDD, Vilde asserts, is an art, not a science. She begins with core tenets: domains as cohesive problem spaces, bounded contexts as clear partitions. At FINN.no, legacy boundaries—tied to functional areas like payments or listings—clashed with vertical ambitions. Her approach: engage stakeholders collaboratively, mapping domains via workshops that blend business goals with technical realities.
Vilde’s toolkit includes event storming, visualizing user journeys to delineate domains. For instance, real estate verticals prioritized distinct user journeys, while cars focused on transactional flows. This divergence necessitated tailored boundaries, ensuring each vertical’s autonomy while maintaining shared services like authentication.
Adapting to Audiences: Evolving Boundaries Over Time
Boundaries evolve, Vilde notes, as teams and goals shift. Early in the merger, real estate teams preserved legacy setups, minimizing disruption, while car verticals embraced user-centric journeys. She experimented with visualizations—temperature gauges, tables—to communicate progress, finding simplicity trumped flair. A table, mapping current versus aspirational states, resonated most, aligning diverse stakeholders.
Her insight: meet audiences where they are. Developers craved technical granularity; executives sought strategic clarity. By tailoring visualizations—diagrams for tech, narratives for business—Vilde bridged divides, ensuring domain maps clicked and stuck.
Balancing Pragmatism and Vision: Iterative Refinement
Pragmatism guided FINN.no’s journey. One vertical, pressed for time, made local decisions, deferring holistic reviews. Another, post-transformation, leaned on jobs-to-be-done, aligning domains to user needs. Vilde’s lesson: flexibility fosters progress. Iterative refinements, validated through experiments, ensured boundaries adapted to new stakeholders, like Nordic partners.
Her capstone: DDD thrives on dialogue. By fostering continuous feedback—workshops, retrospectives—teams co-create boundaries, balancing agility with coherence.
Embracing the Art: Making Domains Click
Vilde’s finale underscores DDD’s artistry: no universal blueprint exists. Success lies in experimentation, stakeholder alignment, and persistent iteration. Her challenge: craft domains that resonate, guiding teams from chaos to clarity with empathy and precision.