Process

Saw this great list on HN today: A Short 100-Question Diligence Checklist

Due diligence is ostensibly about an investor carefully checking out a potential investment in order to make sure everything is in order, but since investment theses already start with real-world data that leads to a thesis, the actual goal is a hostile cross-examination of your own thought process.

37signals posted their Guide to Internal Communication, which is a short and pithy read.

Writing solidifies, chat dissolves. Substantial decisions start and end with an exchange of complete thoughts, not one-line-at-a-time jousts. If it’s important, critical, or fundamental, write it up, don’t chat it down.

Mike Acton’s Expectations Of Professional Software Engineers - Adam Johnson

In a 2019 talk/rant titled “Everyone Watching This Is Fired”, games industry veteran Mike Acton rattled off a sample of 50 things he expects of developers he works with. The title refers to his tongue-in-cheek suggestion that anyone who doesn’t meet all these requirements would be immediately fired.

Although his sense of humour isn’t for everyone, the suggestions are valuable. The list forms a baseline for software engineers to compare themselves against, and it’s not very specific to the games industry.

Adam Johnson make a textual version of the suggestions in the talk, and provided it for reference.

This is a classic; I regularly return to this post for a refresher.

How To Write A Git Commit Message

But a well-cared for log is a beautiful and useful thing. git blame, revert, rebase, log, shortlog and other subcommands come to life. Reviewing others’ commits and pull requests becomes something worth doing, and suddenly can be done independently. Understanding why something happened months or years ago becomes not only possible but efficient.