The pandemic added a lot of uncertainties to my team’s roadmap. Our studio stakeholders’ priorities are changing daily, yet they are too slammed to provide much feedback on our ongoing projects. Given those two constraints, our team must stay agile and flexible. Our work, in response to the pandemic, has looser product definitions with high urgency to deliver now. As a result, much of the work may be thrown away or proven useless. And that’s ok. Now is the time for us to jump into the unknown along with our stakeholders. That’s the least we can do as partners to our studio.

People ❤

Getting the Bigger Role – Brian Donohue

Brian Donohue gives invaluable advice in advancing your career. I especially liked the Caveats section: “it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission, when doing the bigger role,” and “doing the bigger role doesn’t mean you’re entitled to it.” The tricky part for me is to see if I want that bigger role.

Twitter Thread – Steward Butterfield

This thread gives an interesting look at how Slack reacted to COVID-19 for the last two weeks.

Software Engineering 🌐

Tracking Research Questions, Assumptions, and Facts in Agile – Rachel Krause

Product development is a series of experiments creating and validating assumptions. Thus, the learnings from the development are as important as the product itself. But we often lose those learnings when people leave the team. This article helps to make the learnings explicit and long-living.

Introducing Gretchen: Making Fetch Happen in TypeScript – Eric Bailey

It is essential to model a type system as close as possible to the corresponding domain to educate the other developers. But most data fetching libraries often do this:

type Result = { data?: TDataType; error?: TErrorType }

This confuses the domain since it isn’t clear if both data and error can exist, or be absent. But I appreciate Gretchen uses a more explicit union type:

type Result = { data: TDataType; error: undefined } | { data: undefined; error: TErrorType }

Business 💸

O’Reilly’s events business – Laura Baldwin

O’Reilly closes its offline conference business. I wonder two things: how will attendees interact online? More importantly, what will differentiate them from a personal YouTube channel from a speaker’s point of view? O’Reilly is losing so much of its gatekeeping ability.

The End of Starsky Robotics – Stefan Seltz-Axmacher

I feel empathetic to Stefan. There is so much you can do as an individual when the tide is against you. Timing and luck are a huge part of our lives, and you can’t change them once you start your startup.