Month: March 2020

It’s not just scientists that need to take good notes in their lab notebooks. Every day as a software engineer you are figuring out code, determining processes, making decisions, and learning detailed concepts. How many of you are documenting all this, though, writing things down as you go so that others, and even your future self, can benefit from all this hard work?

I challenge you to approach things much more like a scientist or (real) engineer does and start keeping a lab notebook and also publishing your results. It can all be virtual, of course, and probably should be to be searchable and to maximize its visibility to others and across your devices.

Taking a course? Write down your notes. Figure out how to make something work? Write down your notes. Listening in on a meeting? Write down your notes. Working on a project? Write down your notes.

This might be one of the most important skills you can learn.

As a software developer, it’s easy to forget you have customers. I mean, of course you know you have customers. But, without the personal interactions you get as, for example, a retail salesperson or a restaurant waiter, you may need to remind yourself that your seemingly abstract actions and choices have very real effects on people. Pay attention to times when you’re annoyed or disadvantaged by the choices of the software you rely upon, and resolve to avoid committing the same offenses against those that depend on you.

I was reminded of this advice this morning as I went to pull up the O’Reilly Media Learning site to continue my React class and all I saw was this…

On the one hand, fair enough. Live services occasionally need downtime and early on a Saturday morning is probably a reasonable time for it. But, notice there is no indication of when the service would likely be restored. They provide a hint that the downtime will be quick, but 2 hours later, with no updates provided, “…in a flash” seems simply disingenuous. This is clearly more than a simple platform restart. Speaking of updates, there are no warnings of upcoming maintenance, or even status messages of any kind, on O’Reilly’s social media feeds. I took their advice and tried pinging the support email, but you just get an impersonal robo-response and I doubt I’ll see anything further until the outage is over when I’ll get an equally impersonal “Thanks for your patience while we work hard to improve your experience. All services have now been restored.” response.

This is just crappy, lazy work from O’Reilly. It turns me from being mildly frustrated at, yet understanding of, the disruption of my plans to being actively irritated and thinking of ways to broadly share my negative experience.

Let’s take it to heart as a lesson in what not to do, and focus on how to be better developers. Make sure you build your muscles for communicating with your customers, using all the available mechanisms. Give them fair warning, multiple times and far enough in advance that they can act on it. Be transparent about what is going on, even if an outage is unscheduled or you don’t have a resolution ETA. Don’t suggest support channels if you’re not prepared to respond appropriately. Mostly, remember that your product is not simply the normal functioning of your service, but the small quality of life touches that go along with it and make the customer experience worth coming back to.