Justin Cormack

In case you missed it while prepping for Flag Day 🇺🇸 Happy State of Engineering Management Report Day happened this week! The annual thought leadership piece from Jellyfish has dropped. Hear from Engineering leaders, managers and frontline ICs .... we cover a range of topics that matter to great R&D leaders. Key Points: 1️⃣ Engineers are now strategic partners! 🙌 2️⃣ Burnout continues to be a challenge 😱 3️⃣ The talent shortage is spiking back up. 4️⃣ Many teams have embraced #AI 🧠 5️⃣ Others have legit concerns about AI ⁉ If #developerproductivity #genAI #engineeringexcellence are important to you .... have a read! (link in the Comments)

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Every month our N-able Head Nerds provide a huge amount of practical and insightful content in the shape of Bootcamps and Office Hours. This content is specifically created to help you build your business and make the most of the products you use. And they are designed for ANY #MSP....you don't need to be an N-able partner to register and participant in ANY #HeadNerd event. As we close out May and welcome June, it brings us a new round of Boot Camps and Office Hours! Highlights: ☑ This month there is a renewed focus on lead gen and equipping your team with the skills with my “Cracking the Code to Lead Generation” series taking place June 6th and June 12th ☑ I am also co-presenting a BRAND NEW boot camp with Head Security Nerd Lewis Pope focused on N-able MDR called: “Winning Strategies for Pricing and Selling N‑able MDR” on June 26th ☑ Lewis Pope returns with “Cyber Liability Insurance: Planning for Success” on June 20th ☑ Joe Ferla shares more about Cloud Commander with both an intro session and deep dive into the platform! But these are just the highlights. Check out our latest blog that outlines the complete training schedule for June. Links in Comments.

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Google’s 2024 DORA State of DevOps was on my reading list this weekend but instead I decided to read Rachel Stephens’ writeup over on the RedMonk blog. The most interesting takeaway this year is that CoPilots have become established in the SDLC but we’re not seeing gains in productivity. The hypothesis is that coding is not a bottleneck to software delivery, so optimizing that has no gains and there may even be a drop in productivity due to more rework required. On a personal note - I’m only an occasional hacker but spent much of yesterday fixing and refactoring some Python for a data analysis project - I would be literally useless if it wasn’t for coding assistance. But I’m really not representative of the DORA report cohorts. As they stand, I think coding assistants are great for reducing the learning curve (new language, framework, etc.) but they are less useful with design and structure of code.   

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When you work with as many systems as my team does - inevitably you're going to see some pretty terrifying projects. Badly structured code, glaring security flaws, and horrible workarounds to name a few. And while these are scary in their own right... ...what really scares me is that the non-technical people involved often have no idea they're even problems. And until the thing collapses, slows down, development time starts increasing for seemingly no reason, or they have a security breach, the people and teams that are cutting corners actually come off looking better in the short term because cutting corners lets you deliver faster in the short run. I've met business owners who are running systems that represent a MASSIVE risk to their business continuity and have literally no idea (or they do but can only describe it as a 'feeling' that something isn't right). So how do you solve this? Well unless you're genuinely interested in learning to code or following development best practices communities, then your best bet is to start with learning to ask the right questions of your team: -Does this new feature have automated test coverage? -What was the quality assurance process? -Was it code reviewed? Lazy and shortsighted teams will tell you steps like these "just slow things down" but if your project is anything but a prototype - these are actually the tools that enable you to develop at speed in the long run. And if you really don't know where to start then please reach out. If only so that one day when I have to integrate with your tool, I won't have to deal with a bunch of inconsistent data...

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The biggest gripe I had with myself earlier in my career, was being just another engineer. Good perhaps, excellent even but still siloed. Pair that with my love for working at startups, I could feel that there’s more to the problem than moving from Fargate to EKS. And this is something that I have seen across the board. Even if the environment is welcoming and fosters collaboration, we as engineers feel most comfortable with code. Almost bound by a sacred oath to never visit the dark lands of product 😅 The key to change this is to understand you are not there to serve at the whims of jira tickets. You didn’t learn algorithms to be the fastest in the world at sorting. Your ability to breakdown problems and spot patterns extends beyond code. Your empathy for users and the larger problem makes you a better engineer! Certainly more employable, especially in an environment where coding prowess is no longer an edge. PS: I have found PostHog’s notes especially helpful. Terse, and to the point. I hope they help you as well.

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Just the usual morning chat with your technical co-founder Ben 😆 Things are moving fast in SetSeed land, it’s crazy. Making it fun too, otherwise what’s the point eh. Especially with customer requests coming in fast, rapid development, testing Voyager, AWS, Azure etc all at once, migrations, stack scripts, multiple backup systems, cybersecurity etc etc. Awhile back I was actually afraid of success, as it felt uncontrollable. Guess what, in a way it is! But embracing the uncomfortable is crucial to growth. Be like the cicada; get a bit noisy and keep shedding the old you. P.S. SSL simulation is a nifty trick when preparing to migrate customers.

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I'm working with a team in Go and they have these "err != nil checks" everywhere. To me it's a really big smell. I'm not familiar enough with Go to know better though. Feels like in the InitialCall if there's an error a Functional Null Object Pattern should apply. Any Golang experts want to offer up some constructive help? Note, everything has been abstracted out, so don't try to make too much sense of what the code is doing.

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Interesting discussion with Dave Farley and Emily Bache. There are a lot of things that I agree with in it, however the one main sticking point that I have is that a true "engineer" in the more common incarnations, Mechanical, Civil, etc, require registration and licensing from a local state/district and/or governing body. I'd LOVE for programming to have such a system, but we currently don't. That's one reason why I settle with code craft and call myself a crafter. I agree it's not a perfect term, but to me its better than giving the false impression that there's a standard of skillset or understanding like other engineering disciplines. What do you think? https://lnkd.in/gXqmkden

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CTOs are supposed to deliver results, right? Yes. But more importantly → As a CTO, you need to *build a department* that delivers results. Consistently. A hero CTO is not scalable. You can't scale if you're writing production code.  Or solving everyone's tech problems yourself. Your department is a machine. Be an engineer, not a cog.

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The 2024 StackOverflow survey is out, and for the 8th year in a row, Clojure has ranked near the podium in the Top Paying Technologies category—often occupying rank 1. I don't talk much about why I choose to use a weird Lisp—mostly because nobody cares—but the results speak for themselves. If you can hold your nose long enough to learn something very different, you'll find yourself in a high-productivity environment that features: 🔥 Hot code reloading 🦆 Dynamic typing ♻️ Best-in-class garbage collection 📂 Highly performant immutable data structures 📚 Access to the entire JVM's ecosystem of libraries 🧩 Cross-platform compilation to JavaScript 🧠 An unbelievably smart and humble community Sure, you'll pay a high mental price to learn the language, but as a reward, employers will pay a high price for *you*.

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When you start digging into a big dataset like we did for this year’s Tidelift state of the open source maintainer report, there’s some obvious stuff you go in looking to answer like “what percentage of open source maintainers get paid for their work?” or “who is paying them?” But perhaps the most fun part is when you find a little nugget of data, hiding in a dusty corner under a pile of other stuff, that reveals something you didn’t expect to see. 📦 👀 It’s antiquing for data nerds! 🕯 🛋 🎩 Well this next finding was one of those dusty data points, that we weren’t exactly looking for, but popped out and said “ 👋 over here!” — Maintainers are spending 3x more time on security than they did a few years ago. — We are always interested to learn more about how maintainers spend their time. So for this year’s survey, we asked them, as we had in our 2021 survey, to break down the amount of time per month they spend in the following areas on their projects: 🔒 Security work 🔧 Day to day maintenance work 🌱 Building new features 💰 Seeking financial support and sponsors ☑ Other While the percentage of time spent on day-to-day maintenance work stayed pretty consistent between the 2021 and 2024 surveys, from 53% in the previous survey to 50% today, the other percentages changed quite a bit. Perhaps the most significant “look over here” change was that maintainers now report they are spending 👉 almost 3x more time (11%) on security work than they reported in 2021 (4%) 👈 . It makes sense that maintainers spend more time on security, given that they are also seeing increasing demands for their time from corporate users of their projects, security companies giving them potential vulnerabilities to investigate, and pressure to comply with new security requirements and initiatives like the OpenSSF Scorecard and the NIST Secure Software Development Framework, among others. Not to mention, you know, things like the xz utils hack 😳 , that has some maintainers looking over their shoulder a bit (more on that in upcoming posts!). If we’d known going in we were going to see this rise in time spent on security, we probably would have added a followup question to ask maintainers what’s changed. But we don't have to wait til next year! I have a chance to ask that followup question in a few weeks, when we do our webinar discussion about the survey results with some of our favorite maintainers Gary Gregory, Seth Michael Larson, and Jeffrey Clark, plus Tidelift's own Luis Villa and Lauren Hanford. You can sign up for the webinar to hear the answer live on October 17 at this link: https://lnkd.in/g_f4zyj7 And if you want to read more about this surprising finding, check the comments section to download the full report or read today’s blog post.

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The amazingly simple act of delaying naming things in code saves me so much time, effort and produces fabulous results. It's so counter intuitive that something so simple can produce something so surprising. Rules to use this: 1. Get good at the renaming keyboard shortcut, you're going to use it a lot. 2. Get a good simple nonsense naming strategy (e.g. applesauce, blah, pants) 3. If you are spending more than 15-20 seconds on coming up with a name, use a nonsense name (pants, shirt, sock, shoe...) Obviously simple names like "firstName" in the example go ahead and use, if there's a better one later, rename it. Key is don't stress your brain and be quick. Example: You need to create a method that combines first name and last name to return full name. Process (non-tdd): 1. Create a class "Pants". 2. Create a method "shirt" that takes two strings "firstName" and "lastName" and returns a string. 3. Write your logic and return. 4. Now that you are done ask yourself or partner/mob(you get 30 seconds to come up with the best name), "what's is the job of this method?" -> FullNameGenerator. Good enough...rename. Ask yourself, is this good enough or do I need to do more? If yes, give yourself another 30 seconds, if not, go to the class name. 5. What's a good name for the class? (again 30 seconds or less) FirstNameLastNameAggregator? Good enough? Rename. 6. Good enough? Done. Process w/TDD: 1. Create test class PantsTest and method ShouldShirtTest(). 2. Create "Pants pants = new Pants();" 3. create "String actual = pants.shirt(firstName, lastName);" 4. Similar process as above, but I'm now using my IDE to generate/drive the implementation of Pants.shirt(). 5. Run observe failure and fix with simplest possible. 6. Lather/Rinse/Repeat renaming exercise (30 seconds or less, what's a better name for this? rename). 7. Rename method, rename class, rename test variable, rename test method, rename test class. Some of these steps will be done by your IDE. This method, although seems like a lot of work, isn't that much work because I'd frequently rename all the things above...or should have renamed them. I hate doing extra work and find that this optimization saves me time and results in well named code. It also doesn't break my coding flow. What's a good name for this method doing a complex thing? (ponder, tick-tock, 10 seconds) It could be X, Y, Z, XY, YZ, ZX (ding, Slack message...shiny thing...2 minutes later after reading slack). What about XYZ, or ZXY (Slack reply...2 minutes...oh and I ping Paige Watson...6 minutes later). I'm sure everyone knows the drill. Effective naming is one of the hardest things we do as developers. Get good at "good enough" and "emergent". It will save you time and make your code look awesome.

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Here's a concise representation of your ML platform, courtesy of Laszlo Sragner.

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🌟Big news from Flexiana🌟 We’re kicking off some awesome new Clojure projects this year,, and we still have experienced Clojure teams ready to take on more. Here’s the deal: 🛠 Our teams are packed with senior devs who’ve been working with Clojure for 5–10 years. We’re not just about writing code—we deliver clean, maintainable solutions tailored to your needs. 🌐 We’ve got expertise in web apps, functional programming, and even integrating Clojure with Python for AI projects. 🔧 We’re all about using the best tools for the job, drawing from a tech stack that spans 25+ programming languages (yes, we’re nerds like that). Why work with us? ✅ You’ll be working with senior-only teams—no juniors learning on the job here! ✅ We use agile methods, so we can pivot and adapt with you as needed. ✅ We’ve nailed projects in fintech, ERPs, web apps, mobile—you name it. If you’ve got a Clojure project in mind or just want to chat about ideas, let’s talk! We’d love to help you bring your vision to life. For a glimpse into our team's experience, check out this video:

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Head of People and intimidated by compensation? 😥 Hear it straight from Head of People at Immutable, Ami Patel, who was new to building comp practices too. What Ami found was that comp is actually: • Way more fun than you think (I can attest to this), • Great if you like solving ambiguous problems, • All about making the complex, simple. One tip Ami goes on to share is to not tackle this alone. Even if you’re standalone — use your network. Compensation is a universal language. Most of the things you’re solving have been tackled by someone else. At the very least use that network as a good sounding board to talk through what you’re thinking. In the end, it’s resting with you to help create pay practices that are competitive, fair, understandable and actually rewarding. If you’re interested in catching the whole conversation or hearing more interviews like these, check out the FNDN Series here 👉 https://lnkd.in/gT66zBjR

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My latest on Paragraph: Quickstarts Are Recipes - Developers Are Bakers My plea is that developers stop overcomplicating their quickstart guide when building software. Treat your quickstart like a recipe: - Start with a desired outcome, much like a baked good, and get that developer from 0 -> 1 - Set a 'prep time' and 'baking time' that are clear and won't take someone an entire afternoon - Make limited assumptions and make sure you list every single "ingredient" down to what version of a particular library might be a prerequisite or environment constraints - Finally, don't let your quickstart go stale - you want them to buy your cookbook after they follow your recipe. https://lnkd.in/eFDjGR7U

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Want to watch me build an app in 30 minutes at SXSW London? 👀 Only joking… sort of. The way we code and build apps is changing FAST, and I think its super important that engineers are keeping up with the most up to date workflows and tools. Tools like Copilot and Cursor are making development faster, smarter, and more accessible than ever. At SXSW London, I want to show you how to harness these tools for your own projects. My hands-on talk will explore the AI transforming app development and what it means for the future of our industry. But I need your vote to make it happen. ➡️ Sign up for a SXSW voting account and hit the heart on my session page here: https://lnkd.in/eRmSSUnu

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This guy doesn't quite get it, some bullets from his "quiet quitting playbook" * Blocking out private calendar time - I advise teams and developers to do this to not be randomized and to have dedicated flow for their work * Artificially extending project timelines (claiming two weeks for one-day tasks) - Oh you mean pad our numbers so we estimate accurately? * Citing unclear specifications as blockers - never ending stories because of poorly defined specs/stories? * Making numerous small code refactors - Excuse me? All that tech debt that you said you were ok with us adding and promised to give us time to address that never happened? What about simple design, or the TDD loop? What about dealing with this big ball of mud? Or are you asking, "Why don't you just write it right the first time?" * Blaming build system issues - That the build takes 5 hours to run and non-deterministic test failures? * Claiming blockages from other teams - AKA external team dependencies are impacting delivery? * Using technical jargon about "race conditions" to justify delays - This guy obviously isn't technical. Ever tried to debug a "race condition"? * Deflecting tasks by requesting formal ticketing ("can you create a JIRA for that?") - I almost love this one the most. If I spin this another way, "Don't work on any item that I can't see on the Project Board please. https://lnkd.in/et4HYE9E

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