ahayter
Essentially all revenue generating operations halted as of March 16th.
I was unfortunately leading the charge in a newly created division. We were not generating revenue yet, so the hammer fell for all of us.
Stay happy, stay safe, and keep hacking!
I'm unimpressed with essentially the entire framework. It feels over engineered and overly complex with little benefit. Note that I'm saying it feels that way, maybe at some kind of scale this is very helpful, the codebase I'm working in is about 150k sloc.
The biggest gripe for me is how unintuitive it is to compose and reuse bits of UI. Having written almost no React, and absolutely no React professionally, I understand how to compose react components and the basic patterns for communicating between them. It's just not as easy in Angular, so for the most part it just doesn't happen (at least with the devs I'm working with). Patterns such as render props, HOC, stuff like that is not straight forward in Angular. I'm probably not thinking in the "Angular" way or something.
The dependency injection patterns that Angular is so fond of is something I'm not enthralled with as well. It made more sense in angularjs since es2015 modules weren't prevalent at the time, it really solved a problem there. I don't think it's as helpful in Angular now, and is yet another framework specific thing you're going to have to grasp at a decently deep level.
I work right next to another dev that was hired about a month before me. He's coming from writing React for the last couple of years, and angularjs was the first SPA framework he ever learned. He is constantly cursing how Angular does just about everything, he's not a happy camper.
If I was calling the shots today I would not use Angular for my SPA framework.
A process could maybe be considered a room within that building and adding functionality to that process is akin to adding furniture to a room, or I guess, doing a buildout for a tenant. You add specific furnishings to help you accomplish specific tasks within that room.
This analogy breaks down pretty quickly, but think about the room here. I can now explain to a non-technical person that this software (a single process in this case) is like a broom closet that we've shoved full of old furniture for the last 5 years. Prior engineers have stacked tables to the ceiling, filing cabinets have locks without keys. We don't even know what's in the back of the closet at this point, and getting a peak at what's in the back will require unpacking everything at the front.
On the other hand you could have a different room. It has doors for egress and ingress. It has glass walls so we can see what's happening at all times. We carefully arrange the furnishings for efficiency, and can swap out old furniture for new in a matter of moments. We regularly clean the room, removing unused/aging equipment etc... When people enter that room to work (end users) the workflow is effortless and intuitive.
So as a software developer/engineer or whatever you call yourself, we're more like the contractors that buildout interiors for specific use cases. We equip the rooms for doing specific jobs. You give us the building or even just one room and we'll make it useful.
What did you end up measuring? How did you measure it? We've been debating for the last few days on how to measure the outputs and their real business impact without getting caught up measuring the inputs that may or may not really matter (commits, loc, story points, etc...).
For context this is an org that has been, historically, in the dysfunctional area of the operating spectrum, high employee churn, lots of technical debt, no testing to speak of in flagship product, high concentrations of knowledge held by single individuals.
We have somewhat coalesced around the idea of dynamically assigning business impact metrics on a per feature/product basis (if we build this thing we would expect to see metric x, y, z go in said direction). In addition to those metrics we are thinking of also doing something along the lines of an NPS (net promoter score) score that would be given to the feature/product by the end-user. Taking both of these into account would then score the development teams effectiveness/impact.
In addition to the outputs mentioned above we would also be tracking the inputs, but more as a historical data set, to see if there are any correlations between our inputs (commits, loc, story points, etc...) to better NPS and business impact metrics.
I'd love to hear any feedback, experiences, advice.
P.S. Team size is 10 devs, core team of 4 in U.S.A co-located, all others remote international.
http://randycoulman.com/blog/2016/05/24/thinking-in-ramda-ge...
(Read all posts from the second link)
After reading this series of blog posts and using Ramda.js for the last year or so, I can see the value here. But you do have to "get it" which means learning additional concepts, if the additional learning isn't a burden to your team (I hope your team isn't averse to learning new concepts) then I think it's an asset to be used when it makes sense.
If you are using a ton of loaders that aren't v2 ready you may have a more painful experience, you'll have to get familiar with the LoaderOptionsPlugin.
If you're newish to webpack it could be a frustrating experience.
Shout out to the webpack team though, It's an impressive tool.