DaedTech Digest: Monitoring and Agile Transformation Anti Patterns

Alright, I’ll admit it.  I’ve violated the cardinal rule of blogging for the last couple of weeks, and I’ve not shown up here.  I hope you can forgive me.  (At least I’ve avoided charges of hypocrisy by posting to the Hit Subscribe blog, thereby avoiding failure to show up in a place where I give blogging advice.)

Anyway, two weeks ago was the holidays and family, and this week is travel.  My wife and I are on a week-long cross-country driving odyssey from Michigan to San Diego with some stops and some visits sprinkled in.  I’m making this post from a hotel in Little Rock Arkansas.

Still, though, I’ve at least managed to do a DaedTech digest post every week.  And I’ll keep that streak alive today.  Oh, and I will get back to making regular posts again, so no worries.

Picks

• I’m going to be talking at a remote conference in a few weeks.  (More details later)
• For Christmas, I received an Echo Show, which I’m really enjoying so far.  Think of Alexa, but with a screen.
• If you’re in the market for a pair of headphones and you don’t mind spending some money, check these Bose headphones out.  My wife got them for me for Christmas, and they are awesome.  Extremely comfy, noise-cancelling, great sound quality, Bluetooth sync with your phone (or anything).  And they come charged out of the box.  I’m not an audiophile by any stretch, so it makes me being amazed by them all the more telling.
• Finally, I’ll pick my Jeep Grand Cherokee.  Driving between Chicago and my place in Michigan brings us through a miserable band of lake effect snow.  I’ve made that drive twice during the holidays.  Then, yesterday, I drove through that same region and into the start of this blizzard cyclone bomb thing.  And, through it all, the Jeep was a champ in the snow.  Also, this kind of crap is why we’re heading somewhere warm for the winter.

DaedTech Post Digest

• I wrote a post for QA Complete (SmartBear) about understanding test case management.  Think managing QA-style testing, rather than anything related to unit tests.
• A little over three months ago, I announced something I called the “singleton challenge” for the NDepend blog.  This was an announcement/preview of a new line of posts I’m doing over there where I do empirical studies of the properties of codebases.  In this case, the idea was to put some data behind a post I’d written suggesting that singleton usage has a variety of negative effects on codebases.
• For Scalyr, I wrote about different types of server monitoring software.  What might you want to know about your code in production?
• On the SubMain blog, I wrote about how code comments and documentation aren’t the same thing.  Anything you stick in the codebase with a couple of whacks in front of it is a comment.  But that doesn’t mean it’s documenting anything (or even helping).
• Here’s kind of a fun one.  For TechTown, I wrote about agile transformation anti-patterns.  I’ve seen a lot of different companies trying to “go agile” and there are distinct issues that emerge as somewhat universal, or at least common.
• Finally, I wrote a post for Rollout about how you can use feature flags to go from architectural monoliths to a microservice architecture.