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My personal quest for a UML diagramming tool

Guest post by A. Cranky, Old Man

tl;dr – I’m using Visual Paradigm.

When I needed a way to create a reasonably good-looking sequence diagram for a recent engagement, I was suprised to discover more than 80 diagramming tools on the market. Given such a large pool of candidates, I expected to find several good ones, and I embarked on my quest in hight spirits.

You’d think at my age I would know better.

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Where to Find Prominent Voices in Software Other Than Twitter

Where to Find Prominent Voices in Software Other Than Twitter

Updated 6 Nov 22

Thousands of thoughtful and experienced software professionals use Twitter to share information and interact with one another. We’ve come to depend on Twitter as a source of information and interaction with colleagues.

With the recent changes at Twitter, many users are looking for alternative social media platforms. But many of us hesitate to “leave” Twitter because that’s where we find industry leaders in the software field, and we don’t want to miss out on what they have to teach us.

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How we think about recruiting

There’s an odd situation in the software industry. Employers are adamant that they can’t find suitable talent to fill the technical jobs they have. Job candidates are adamant that they can’t find suitable work. It seems strange to me that both these things are true at the same time.

Many people have opinions and observations about this. Often, they cite academic studies, industry surveys, formal management models, psychology, and various other things that are confusing for a Bear of Very Little Brain like me. I wonder if we could go a long way toward solving this problem if we ajusted, just slightly, the way we think about what we’re aiming to accomplish, on the hiring side and on the job search side.

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Scrum pain in large organizations

Although “agile” has been around a long time, and Scrum even longer, many large organizations are only now undertaking “agile transformation” initiatives. People in those organizations who have not had experiences elsewhere with “agile” or Scrum are on the learning curve. I’ve noticed a handful of challenges that seem to be fairly common in these organizations.

Maybe it will be helpful to mention some of the common points of confusion and try to clarify them. I hope so, anyway.

tl;dr warning
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Gilded Rose: Read by Refactoring

People who practice refactoring often turn to the Gilded Rose exercise, originally posted by Bobby Johnson and extended and elaborated by Emily Bache. The exercise can be approached in many different ways. I think that makes it especially useful for exploring alternative ways of dealing with existing code bases.

Several years ago, Arlo Belshee came up with an interesting way to address existing code that he calls read by refactoring. I will admit that I haven’t discussed this with him directly, nor have I attended his training on the subject. I’m basing this on my reading of the idea online and experimenting with the approach on my own. So, I might be missing key aspects of the idea. Please feel free to correct me if that’s the case.
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80/20 Skills

People in our field like to cite various maxims or laws. To name a few, there are Conway’s Law, Hyrum’s Law,
Brooks’ Law, the Peter Principle, Hofstadter’s Law, the 90-90 Rule, Parkinson’s Law, Sayre’s Law, Eagleson’s Law, Postel’s Law (a.k.a. the Robustness Principle), Linus’ Law, the Dunning-Kruger Effect, the Principle of Least Astonishment, Hanlon’s Razor and it’s notable parent, Occam’s Razor, and of course the ever-popular Murphy’s Law.

I’d like to consider a couple of maxims today: the Law of Diminishing Returns and the Pareto Principle, or 80/20 Rule, in relation to the idea of multi-skilled team members on a cross-functional team.
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