Year: 2017

Software Engineering at Google

Fergus Henderson, who has been a software engineer at Google for 10 years, published the PDF document entitled “Software Engineering at Google“, where he collects and describes key software engineering practices the company is using.

It covers the following:

  • software development – version control, build system, code review, testing, bug tracking, programming languages, debugging and profiling tools, release engineering, launch approval, post-mortems, and frequent rewrites.
  • project management – 20% time, objectives and key results (OKRs), project approval, and corporate reorganizations.
  • people management – roles, facilities, training, transfers, performance appraisal and rewards.

Some of these practices are widely known, some not so much.  There are not a lot of details, but the overall summaries should provide enough food for thought for anyone who works in the software development company or is involved in management.

 

Presentation slides with HTML5 systems

In the last few month I had to prepare quite a few presentations and slides.  This is not something that I’m very familiar with, so every time I end up with either LibreOffice or Google Slides or some other overpowered tool.  Clicking around, formatting and reformatting, and having absolutely no version control that I am so used to for my programming and system administration needs – I thought there must be a better way.

Looking at some of the technical talks and presentations around, I discovered that the world is indeed a better place than what I think of it after spending hours in the fight with fonts and pictures.  Apparently, there are quite a few systems now that utilize the power of HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript to help a semi-technical person keep his sanity.

Sitepoint has a helpful list of “5 of the Best Free HTML5 Presentation Systems“.  Some of the links are broken, but even those that work have enough options to choose from:

I have a big and important presentation to prepare next week, so I’ll give these three a go and see which one I like the most.

Creative Commons beta tests new search

Creative Commons is beta testing a new search implementation.  It helps with finding creative work (mostly images for now) that one can use commercially, modify, adapt, and build upon.  For now, it brings the results from a few different sources that you’d have to search separately before – 500px, Flickr, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Public Library, and Rijksmuseum.

I’m sure once the functionality and performance are stabilized, more resources and types of creatives will be added.  After all, Creative Commons works with quite a few platforms.

Oh, and if you’ve spent the last few years in a cave and don’t know what Creative Commons is all about, here are a couple of links for you:

Via WordPress Tavern.

 

pds/skeleton is now stable

PHP Package Development Standard, aka pds/skeleton, is now stable.  I’ve linked to it before and I think it’s a great idea and I’m glad I’m not alone:

Roughly 78,000 packages already comply with the pds/skeleton standard, although they may not know it. To formally show that your package has adopted the standard, “require-dev” it via Composer, or display a badge on your README.

I’d gladly follow this standard for my own work too, except that I mostly work with WordPress and CakePHP these days, both of which do things differently from the standard and from each other.

WordPress kind of assumes that the whole project is public, so you don’t really get public/ folder.  It also organizes the code into wp-includes/, wp-admin/ and wp-content/ folders, instead of the src/ suggested by PDS.  And, in terms of configuration, everything goes into wp-config.php file instead of something in the config/ folder.

CakePHP is much closer to PDS in terms of organization of files.  The only difference that I can spot is the use of webroot/ folder instead of the suggested public/.

I’d really love to see larger libraries and frameworks adhere to the PDS, but until that happens, I’ll keep an eye on things.

P.S.: The standards comic strip is of course from xkcd.