Is deploying on Fridays considered harmful?

Hey 🚀!

I've started writing on LinkedIn this week. Another experiment in an unknown environment with different rules. It's a bit unbelievable, but I've been able to post almost every day. It's unbelievable because I wasn't expecting to come up with stuff that fast, and the plan was, and still is, to post once a week.

Lately, ideas come to my mind at odd times and I jot them down. Not many ideas, just a few, probably not good ones. But it seems to me that the more I create, the easier—if ever so slightly—it is to come up with them and write.

Fiverr and Upwork investigations are paused until next month, when I seriously have to start thinking about income, and freelancing and contracting are solid options before going back to work for a company. I have other ideas in mind, but still in the incubation stage.

This week’s briefer:

• Deploying on Fridays, a controversial topic

• The pitfalls of solo working

• Learning from incidents and Human Factors

• Off-topic: climate change, IPCC and denial

Deploying on Fridays, a controversial topic

On Twitter, the topic of the week was whether you should deploy on Fridays or not. À la Michael Jordan, it became personal with me. Personal enough to write a post.

I was part of teams that deployed changes to production many times a day, Monday to Friday, for years. We cared about quality, resiliency and, of course, our weekends. It takes time and continuous improvement, but having the ability to deploy any time, any day, on demand, without it being a big deal is possible and desirable. What do you think?

The pitfalls of solo working

In my opinion, the best kind of work in software development happens when we work together, collaboratively, sharing knowledge and putting all our minds to the problem. I worked this way enough to know that working solo produces suboptimal results.

When we reduce work in progress and embrace synchronicity with pair programming or software teaming (formerly known as mob programming), fantastic things can happen.

Learning from incidents and Human Factors

I love reading stories about incidents. It’s not because I have a morbid fascination with them, but because there’s a lot to learn about resiliency by analysing how people responded and adapted to them to prevent future issues. We can apply the lessons to our work.

This is a story about a busy runway airport where drivers need to cross a runway and follow a well-established process. An incident happens, one driver ignores procedure and crosses an open runway. Luckily, there were no aircraft movements at that time.

The key points are:

• Interventions can present additional unintended consequences that were never foreseen or predicted during traditional safety assessments.

• Multiple changes at the same time impact performance in ways that may not be imagined.

• When planning a change in practice, speak to a variety of stakeholders, especially front-line practitioners, to understand the work, the context, and to get their views on possibilities for change.

Off-topic

This week’s off-topic could actually be considered the most on topic issue in the world: climate change.

The IPCC released this Monday the sixth edition of their synthesis report, the most important report about climate change, and the entire world should’ve stopped at once and do something about it. Professor Katharine Hayhoe summarizes the key takeaways:

I constantly ask myself why we’ve failed to rise to the challenge every time and, while I don’t have a complete answer, I discovered a fantastic paper describing the main discourses of climate delay. One of the most frustrating ones, since I work in tech, is technological optimism: tech will save us. It’s far-fetched and naive because unless the tech is massively revolutionary—and appears on time—or it can make systemic changes, it will only be a part of the solution, an essential part, but a part nonetheless.

Lastly, I’ve seen how climate change deniers reject the facts. Explaining the facts is not enough. In reality, it happens with any form of extreme denial. From social science, we know that, at the very core, this denial of facts and science is part of people’s identity. Attempting to educate people can deepen the polarization if what we’re explaining attacks their identity, and we have to be careful about our approach: