Leadership Checklist for Non-Technical Managers

How do you build software that provides value to both clients, owners and engineers?

This list has started as a list of notes that I kept over the last few years. Yes, this is the abbreviated version of Management For Quality Software.

Executive Leadership

• Bloated and ugly products are born at the top, but a good engineering environment may begin there
• The three ways business leaders can add value is with numbers, numbers, numbers
• Put your name on the product

The Business Requirement

Write a business requirement that reflects specific details about a problem that the business is solving based on market research numbers. A full description is beyond this terse scope.

This started as a list of notes for my boss on how I see the best way to manage technical professionals. I am trying to provide non-technical managers with the resources to direct technical teams in a way that will produce quality software and keep the engineering staff engaged and moving.

How do you build software that provides value to both clients, users, owners and engineers for the years to come?

This essay is not an attack on the people who claim membership to a philosophical outlook, but an exposition on the inherent difficulties which exist in maintaining traditional systems.

Let us begin with the needful: term definition.

Term Definition

Conservatism as a political and social philosophy promotes retaining traditional social institutions in the context of the culture and civilization.

This is the definition found at Wikipedia and I find it to be a pretty good summation of the idea. Conservatives are those who hold the belief that there is value in the current institutions and that change will have negative effect on the systems of value that the previous generations have passed forward.

Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that they may live. Socrates - Plutarch, How a Young Man Ought to Hear Poems

A Warrior’s Diet

What physically intimate activity do we participate in more than any other?

Eating

The Philosophy

One of the more immediate steps in becoming awake is overcoming the omnivore’s dilemma. The passion of hunger. We take other living things into our bodies and literally become one with them. Most religions incorporate some form of consumption into their ritual. It is part of every culture and one of those most important glues in uniting various traditions.

PHPUnit Is Slowness

I love PHPUnit don’t get me wrong. More than a testing library, I like testing, or having tests. It’s like the code got yo back bro! Build code that lasts.

EDIT: I know most of the problems are inherent with tests not the testing framework. However, my requirements dictate how I use it to a certain extent. Peace.

PHPUnit is painfully slow.

Seriously. Though. Maybe having a concurrent environment it can run it would help. I worked at a place with 65,000 unit tests and if they ran as slow as our unit tests here it would never finish. It was literally taking 30-60 seconds per test. That is 65000 x 60 = 1083 hours or 45 days.

Deploying Hugo the Golang CMS on DigitalOcean

Creating a Droplet

I am a bit partial to CentOS. The lastest version as of this writing is CentOS Linux release 7.1.1503 (Core).

Setting up a droplet is always very simple. Just turn it on basically. Upload your ssh keys. Done.

Install Nginx

Add the epel repo:

yum install epel-release

Install

yum install nginx

Start it

service nginx start
systemctl enable nginx

Create the Folders

mkdir -p /var/www/ursite/
chown -R nginx:nginx /var/www
touch /var/www/ursite/index.html - or clone your site
cp /etc/nginx/sites-available/default /etc/nginx/sites-available/ursite

Configure nginx

open the config file: vim /etc/nginx/conf.d/virtual.conf

Hugo: A Replacement for Wordpress

TL;DR

• I researched go
• Found Hugo
• Setup a test
• Migrated my Wordpress instance
• Launched DigitalOcean Droplet
• Deployed

Total time: 6 hours

Continued:

My problems started almost a year before I took up this cause. At the time I only had 2 Wordpress sites. Very very low traffic. Only a couple users a day. They were mostly place holders for business sites.

Wordpress is hungry

What was annoying about the case was that they would randomly carsh! I realized they were running out of memory. I couldn’t figure out why because I just wouldn’t let myself believe that a couple instances of Wordpress were enough to run out of memory. It was an AWS box running with .5GB of memory and some swap space. I can’t remember what. Maybe I was just too optimistic.

If I stacked pennies from the ground to the top of the Empire State Bldg, would they all fit into this room?

Firstly dear sir, you do not have that many pennies.

Secondly if you cash it in for large bills then they all fit in your pocket.

It is a question like this that would make me decide alternatively in my career choice. However I see tech managers searching for really “smart” interview questions and white board problems in an attempt to stump the prospective employee. Is the work you do not interesting enough that you are unable to ask a question related to the job? I have also found that blowing these tests off had zero effect in my employability. If they want you they already want you. Kinda like approaching attractive women.

Download the Entire Site with wget

If you don’t have homebrew please install it. It will make all our lives easier.

Howto

This was kinda simple but I wanted to post it here for reference.

On thing I would like to note is the wait and limit-rate. Make sure you don’t trip any throttles or piss off any website owners by leaving the pipes wide open.

wget \
     --recursive \
     --no-clobber \
     --page-requisites \
     --convert-links \
     --wait=5 --limit-rate=20K \
     --domains api.yoursite.com \
     --no-parent \
         http://api.yoursite.com/

Alternate you can run the mirror command

In the Beginning

There was the Web. World Wide actually. Well, before that there was something of AOL, Berners-Lee, DoD, DARPA, ARPANET and a prototype of Al Gore launching carrier pigeons down long tubes with fortune cookie-sized packets tied to their little legs addressed to: “Wh@t_#hath_God_wr0ught?”.

Fast-forward: now we have Skynet. Well not yet, but soon. Hopefully. At least that is why I intend to generate favor with our future overlords by suggesting, at least locally, that certain systemic changes be encouraged so that their manifestation onto the stage be smooth and welcoming. And when they decide who to purge, I might sidestep the algorithm. It’s still a theory.