Tuesday, 19th February 2019
The Eleven Laws of Showrunning (via) Fascinating essay on how to run a modern TV show by Javier Grillo-Marxuach. Being a showrunner basically involves running a 100+ person startup with a 7 digit budget, almost immovable deadlines, high maintenance activist investors and you're still expected to write some of the scripts! So many useful lessons here about management, creativity and delegation: almost everything in here is relevant to product management, startup founding and engineering management as well.
This one is the "nice" version - a not so nice version is available as well.
parameterized. I love the @parametrize decorator in pytest, which lets you run the same test multiple times against multiple parameters. The only catch is that the decorator in pytest doesn’t work for old-style unittest TestCase tests, which means you can’t easily add it to test suites that were built using the older model. I just found out about parameterized which works with unittest tests whether or not you are running them using the pytest test runner.
Lessons from 6 software rewrite stories (via) Herb Caudill takes on the classic idea that rewriting from scratch is “the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make” and investigates it through the lens of six well-chosen examples: Netscape 6, Basecamp Classic/2/3, Visual Studio/VS Code, Gmail/Inbox, FogBugz/Wasabi/Trello, and finally FreshBooks/BillSpring. Each story has details I had never heard before, and the lessons and conclusions are deeply insightful.