If you haven't already, go check out this week's episode of Dead Code with Samir Talwar. Also, I can't be more jealous of his personal site's domain, functional.computer. Nice snag, dude.

Gatekeeping and Gate-getting-rid-of

I invited Samir on after reading his article, Programming Peaked. A few different bits in the article resonated with me.

First, he's critical of pull request-based workflows. I'm with him. The code review process as it exists in most teams is a bottleneck. The evidence that it's necessary is mixed. At minimum, there's a tradeoff being made by gating merges on reviews and next to no one is actually treating it as such.

We also discussed the role of testers. I'm pretty adamant that most teams are misusing their testers and QA teams. I still watch teams with complex QA workflows that gate their production deploys, despite the fact they could have automated tests that validate 95% of what the QA testers are testing.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying that QA teams aren't useful or necessary for most organizations. I'm saying that we should have the humans checking things that humans are good at checking and have the computer check things that the computer is good at checking. That and we need to reduce the number of bottlenecks if we want our teams to move faster.

There's a lot more in the conversation, but the through line was that we've trade simplicity and effectiveness for complexity that isn't serving us most of the time. We need to think more critically about the tradeoffs our organizations are making, not just continue to accept the current cultural defaults.

ARCHSPIRE – Carrion Leader

It's easy to explain Archspire: they are to tech death what Dragonforce is to power metal. Speed is their thing. They are also from Vancouver, BC, so I've experienced one of their end-of-tour homecoming shows.

Before that show, I was at a bar, having some drinks and chatting up the bartender. Turns out that the bartender had worked with Oli Peters (the vocalist) before the band blew up, when Oli was still in the service industry. The bartender had only one thing to say about the man: that he was an absolutely lunatic.

He was not wrong. Boy was that a show.

Here's their new track.