Cheapest way to improve developer productivity

Dirt cheap and easy, just two things:
  1. give them the best IDE you can afford
  2. a large screen display (27" or above)



Popular posts

From 0 to ZFS replication in 5m with syncoid

The ZFS filesystem has many features that once you try them you can never go back. One of the lesser known is probably the support for replicating a zfs filesystem by sending the changes over the network with zfs send/receive. Technically the filesystem changes don't even need to be sent over a network: you could as well dump them on a removable disk, then receive  from the same removable disk.
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Opengrep quickstart

Since I could not find a quickstart to run opengrep with the full set of rules from their fork I thought I'd document what I found out. Setup Download the opengrep binary from github and make it executable with chmod +x . Clone the rules repo: git clone git@github.com:opengrep/opengrep-rules.git and clean it up to make it usable to opengrep: cd opengrep-rules rm -rf ".git",".github",".pre-commit-config.yaml", "elixir", "apex" find . -type f -not -iname "*.yaml" -delete rm -rf .github rm -rf .pre-commit-config.yaml Ensure opengrep can load the rules with: opengrep_manylinux_x86 validate . The same can be done for custom rules maintained in a separate repository. AFAIU Multiple repositories can be specified by repeating -f option as needed, see below. We are now ready to scan a repo, from the repo root directory run: opengrep_manylinux_x86 scan \   -f <path_to>/opengrep-rules \   --error \   --exclude-rule=VAL some ti...
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Cost Center or Value Center?

In business, a cost center (e.g., IT, HR, Legal) is a team that does not directly generate revenue, regardless of how well it is perceived. Within that category, there can be teams that end up being seen as a low-value cost center. In this writing, I am intentionally conflating the two, and even push for the logic that a cost center team (from a business point of view) can be perceived as a profit center when it increases business efficiency. My explanation is that this shift into negative happens when these teams' output does not meet the required business outcomes. For example, a software team could be constantly merging code but never ship anything useful or shipping too late: output is high, business outcomes are low. ( Read this excellent paper for more details ). Any attempt on the team's part to disprove this negative perception with facts or hard numbers is doomed to fail unless it is about business outcomes. Depending on the organizational maturity, understanding how a...
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