Month: August 2021

Effective software teams are essential for any organization to deliver value continuously and sustainably. But how do you build the best team organization for your specific goals, culture, and needs?

In the first episode of a two-part series, Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, authors of the new book Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow, join the Dev Interrupted podcast to share their secrets to successful team patterns and organization design. They also discuss how to build adaptive team models capable of evolving with technological change and organizational maturity.

When it comes to security tools, you’re typically balancing two things: how much time it takes for a tool to run to get deeper results vs. the quality of results returned.

As you might expect, faster tools scan just the source code in a single repo (without looking in the open-source libraries and SDK used) and may detect easy-to-find vulnerabilities. In contrast, tools that give better results and can find more challenging vulnerabilities with fewer false positives require more time to complete their scans.

If you’re an SRE, there’s a decent chance that you live and die by the “Four Golden Signals.” Alongside similar concepts like the RED Method, the Four Golden Signals form the foundation for many a monitoring and observability strategy today.

That’s not a bad thing. In many ways, the Golden Signals excel at distilling complex monitoring processes down into a core set of easy-to-digest concepts.

Technology forms the major backbone of our society today. However — not all technology is accessible to people with disabilities, which comprise around 15% of the world’s population. According to the 2021 WebAIM study, “97% of the top one million home pages had accessibility issues.” Moreover, according to an analysis from UsableNet Inc., the number of web accessibility lawsuits is expected to reach a total of a whopping 4,195 in 2021. These statistics reveal that we, in the software community, can do a lot better to make our technology more accessible. Software engineers can contribute by baking accessibility in their development process instead of waiting until accessibility auditing or fixing bugs at the end. Here are a few ways on how to get started:

1. Review the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)

These are an extensive set of guidelines on how to make your web application accessible to not just users who use screen-readers, but also other types of disabilities such as Deaf/Hard of Hearing, cognitive or motor disabilities. Many of these guidelines and principles also apply to Desktop based applications or really any technical product you can think of.  For software engineers focused on web development and who want to learn more the accessibility infrastructure of the web, I recommend reading up on Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) and the Accessibility Tree.