[Oldletter #9] Trunk-based development, programming falsehoods and managing cognitive load in software teams
Every Friday, I’m sharing a short list of evergreen articles/resources broadly related to software engineering that wouldn’t typically get shared in most tech newsletters or social media feeds.
This week’s links
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Trunk Based Development (2017) by Paul Hammant.
A source-control branching model, where developers collaborate on code in a single branch called ‘trunk’/‘main’ and resist any pressure to create other long-lived development branches by employing documented techniques.
I’m still surprised about how many devs still aren’t aware of TBD. This microsite is an excellent resource for learning its benefits compared to other approaches, the different variations of it (pushing to main vs PRs in short-lived branches) and techniques such as feature flags which address common objections.
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Falsehoods Programmers Believe (2015) by Scott Vandehey. A fun and eye-opening look at false assumptions programmers make around things such as names, dates, time, geography and more. The post links out to several other posts (including this curated awesome list of lists) so you can go deeper down the rabbithole. A few of my favourites:
- “(All) People have names”
- “The time
23:59:60is always invalid” - “A single postcode will be larger than a single building”
- Managing Cognitive Load for Team Learning (2015) by Jo Pearce. In today’s fast-moving tech landscape “trying to keep up with new technology can cause stress, anxiety and self-doubt”. This piece gives some background on the science behind cognitive load, the 3 categories of it (intrinsic, extraneous and germane) and recommends some tactics for managing or eliminating common manifestations of it in software teams.
Submitting your recommendations
If you’d like to share an evergreen article/book which has significantly influenced your thinking or practice around software delivery, please email it through to me and I’ll add it to my backlog for sharing in future editions.
Have a great weekend!
— Paul
Paul Swail
Indie Cloud Consultant helping small teams learn and build with serverless.
Learn more how I can help you here.
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