Turing Fest 2017 Summary

The 2-pizza rule - Development teams should be able to be fed by 2 pizzas. So no teams larger than 6-8 people. Any larger and communication becomes an issue.
Trend is local hardware to cloud servers, monolithic architecture to micro services, and serverless

Nobody reads release notes for app updates
- because they're hidden behind a View More link
- as a result companies don't write informative release notes
- even large companies like Facebook
Some companies do a great job - 1Password, Slack
- they include a TLDR
- bullet points
The Perfect Release Note
- An introduction
- TLDR
- New / Improvements / Fixes
- A call to action to get feedback
Going even further
- Localized release notes for specific languages
- Don't ever say 'Minor bug fixes' - tell them specifically what was fixed
But nobody reads release notes...
- True, but some do - its quality over quantity
- People write in to give feedback
- Use a ratings block CTA. Direct users who vote 4-5 stars to the app store so they can rate the app. Direct users who vote 1-3 stars to an email to get their feedback

Style is important
Thinking in pages - many sites use a similar page layout with headers, footers, sidebar and main content
OOCSS, SMACSS, BEM help modularize CSS
Hurdles to being independent modules
- Inheritance
- Cascade
- Browser Defaults
- Putting Modules Together
Pros to using the above systems
- Reduce the intersections
- Simplify selectors
- Dont need to be able to understand cascade
Cons
- These methods are not libraries, so they require diligence
- No tooling
Atomic CSS / Functional CSS
- Single style classes
Styled Components / CSS Modules
Web Components
- Templates, shadow don, custom elements, HTML imports

Pryor/Spolsky split their company Fog Creek 50/50, but vesting rules prevented either from leaving and keeping their 50%
Stackoverflow and Trello were much later products - they had many failures before that - Fogbugs, Citydesk
On becoming a CEO/manager from a developer - you might like it, you might not. The skills are totally different.
Worst bugs Pryor ever - pointed the e-commerce endpoint to the payment gateways sandbox account - so it looked like it was working but nobody was being charged. Also, once forgot to add sales tax and the state came looking for it.

Works for FreeAgent
About 50 out of 130 of their team is distributed
A distributed team requires all team members show their commitment to the success of the company
Building a successful distributed team:
- Critical Mass - avoid snowflakes. One or two remote team members when the rest of the team is localized will not usually work
- Break through glass ceilings - management needs to understand the issues and complexities of working remotely
- Office-based team members should have the ability to work from home occasionally to develop empathy for remote team members
- Treat on-site and remote fairly, not equally -
- Organize meetups for team members to meet in person
- Communicate intentionally
- Collaborate daily to build trust - use tools to communicate - trello, slack, github, screenhero, Gsuite, grafana
Traits of successful remote works
- Being visible
- Being honest and open
- Being responsive
- Delivering - do what you say you're going to do and be accountable
- Being consistent - by showing your work
Showing your work
- Create PRs and ask for feedback
- Collaborate across the company
For remote managers
- Wath the work, not the worker
- Do your homework - budget, law, expectations
- Understanding rules for hiring workers in different countries

Adam Gross is CEO of Heroku, which is now 10 years old
App Dev is still accelerating
New pillars of PaaS
- Development Experience
- Customer Experience
- Trust and Enterprise
New Data Services and Events
- Relational / NoSQL DBs - PostgresSQL, Redis, MongoDB
- Large Data Stores - Hadoop, Cassandra
- Event Management - Kafka
- Data Processing - Spark, Apache Storm
The nature of our applications will change as these services become commoditized

Brett DeWoody