InRhythm

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Agile & Lean

The Latest in React and Agile: What We’re Reading Now

Here’s what our Practice Leadership Team is reading around the web:

Understanding React – React 16.3 + Component life-cycle Medium.com “Having a new lifecycle method (`getDerivedStateFromProps`) to keep props/state synchronized—and the ability to use it to set default state (instead of in the constructor)—is extremely helpful. Its return value updates state (like `setState`), allowing you to update state based on updated props instead of messing with a combination of `componentWillReceiveProps` (which will be deprecated) and `setState`. I’ve been using the new Context API extensively, and I’m looking forward to using these new lifecycle methods.“

The Security Model of WebAssembly Hacker News “The security model of WebAssembly offers great new applications that can save a lot of time spent navigating or accounting for variable image sizes and loading. In particular, it provides simple, automatic handling of perfectly sized images and image substitution while the original loads. It’s a relatively seamless system for image handling without the tangle of excessive callbacks.“

Sonar GitHub “Sonar is a debugging platform aimed at mobile app development on iOS and Android. It’s open-source, which allows for transparency and customization for users looking to make their own, use-specific plugins. It’s already got a fairly robust library, and we’re looking forward to seeing where it goes from here.“

Chrome 68 Page Lifecycle API Google “Properly managing operating system resources is an essential part of development, and the new Page Lifecycle API with Chrome 68 allows us to see when hidden tabs are being frozen and unfrozen through the `freeze` and `resume` events. More robust tools for monitoring state changes are always helpful in driving the process of setting up inputs and notifications, for instance, so easier transparency is a huge help for our processes.“

Cupcakes, Application Design, and UX

This post is another by InRhythm’s own Sari Morninghawk. For the full post and additional links, check out the original “Cupcakes, Application Design, and UX” on her website.

My grandkids are often an inspiration for many of my best ideas. For example, when I came home from work yesterday, my oldest granddaughter had her homemade cupcakes on display in the kitchen. They were her original recipe, exceptionally beautiful, and also — delicious. Riding the train into work this morning, my mind wandering towards my next blog, I realized that these cupcakes are a perfect metaphor for excellent app design and a wonderful user experience (UX).

There are many ways to look at this. The simplest being that the beauty of the cupcake is good design, causing the consumer, in the case of the cupcake or the user, in the case of the application, to do what you want. Consumers eat the cupcake; users read, shop, sign up, or whatever action is the goal. If the cupcake is delicious, the consumer has an enjoyable experience. If the cupcake doesn’t taste good or has a disagreeable texture, the consumer has a poor experience regardless of the cupcake’s visual appeal. The objective of design is to compel the user into action resulting in a positive UX.

On the subject of Learning and Growth

Here at InRhythm, we’re passionate about Learning and Growth. Normally I don’t unnecessarily capitalize words, but that’s the subject of this post and I think it’s important to emphasize those words and what they mean. We define Learning and Growth as the process of becoming a better, more advanced person, capable of handling new and familiar situations more efficiently and effectively. So why are learning and growth so important to us? Because our people want it!

What’s the problem?

Across all industries, but especially in the consulting industry, employee retention is a big issue. Consulting has one of the highest turnover rates of all industries. Historically, a lot of consulting companies have employed a more dog-eat-dog mentality. “We’re in an industry that’s all about the bottom line, so why shouldn’t we treat our employees the same way?” – these companies employ a strategy along the lines of “grow or go,” treating employees like they must either climb the corporate ladder or get out because there’s no room for those who do not aspire to be the CEO. The problem here is that not everybody wants to be a CEO and that is okay.

Employee retention is almost exclusively a function of employee satisfaction. In all cases of turnover (voluntary or involuntary termination), it is due to poor employee satisfaction. Terminations are largely based on performance and there is an established correlation between employee satisfaction, productivity, and retention. Keeping employees happy and productive requires a large investment by employers, but those that have made the commitment find that the return on their investment far exceeds what they invested. Which brings us again to what satisfies employees? How do employers keep them happy?

Broken attempts to fix it…

A lot of people are aware of the correlation between employee satisfaction and employee retention. There are a multitude of issues that could lead to dissatisfaction such as poor management or no trust between coworkers, but I want to focus on learning and growth. I’ve seen many different employers try to make their employees happier but their efforts are usually a little misguided. They try things like snazzing up the office with new decor, mandatory team-building exercises, holiday parties, or just throwing money at the problem and offering people bonuses or incentives. The last one is actually the most problematic. Studies show that once people reach a “comfortable” income level (adjusted for your location) they’re much less concerned about exact dollar amounts and more about their lifestyle. A raise will simply not keep people around as much as getting their own office and/or fixing whatever cultural problem they’re suffering from.

How we address it

We try to give people exactly what they want. Across the board, most people look for jobs to be growth opportunities. They want their position to be something they learn-into and then later something that provides them more contextual and higher-level growth. Very few people, especially in this industry, want to just do what they already know how to do. They want to do something slightly different to keep their brain and their career growing.

“Our people are the most important part of our company. It’s not the budgets, it’s not the office and the toys, it’s not messaging or branding… It’s the people that we work with.”

We try to provide growth in several ways. First, we only take on projects working on modern, interesting tech; our people don’t want to work on legacy apps maintaining code written years ago, they want new stuff where they can stretch their creative muscles. Only taking on modern projects means potentially turning down lucrative projects, but we also have the peace-of-mind that the whole team isn’t going to quit in 2 weeks. We also host a TON of learning events. So far this year we’ve worked on meetups exploring best practices in VueJS, CSS, and UX Design. We get good attendance at these meetups and I think it’s because our people really yearn to learn. We’re also very into finding learning resources for our people. Personally, I make sure to share as much interesting stuff on Slack as I can so that the team can benefit from the same interesting bits that I benefit from. We have a huge bookshelf at the office with books on all sorts of topics: Philosophy, Management, Coding, Interviewing, Business Development…

One of the reasons I joined a consultancy and InRhythm, in particular, is because of the opportunity for learning and growth and I wasn’t disappointed. Since I started here, I’ve been able to work on multiple client sites, learning about different cultures and processes. I’ve been able to work on different JavaScript frameworks that I might not have worked on otherwise. I’ve played different roles in the company and best of all: I’ve been able to spend time with a diverse group of interesting people. This kind of positive experience is easy to reproduce, all you have to do is listen to your people. If they say they want learning and growth, give it to them! If they say they want better snacks or more wall art or the budget to go to a conference, give it to them! Those happy, learning, growing employees will produce more than any others you’ve had before and they’ll stay with the company for a nice long time.

Additional Resources:

Examining NYC DevOps Team Motivation

 

As we stand here in the fall of 2017, one must understand why DevOps is a critical mission for companies in NYC and around the world. It has quite a lot to do with motivation. Today, I wanted to dig into some motivational characteristics, particularly for some of the key contributors within the DevOps cycle:

Developers are like astronauts. They are curious, imaginative and often thinking about ways to innovate! Completing new features is critical and they are continually moving onto bigger and brighter tasks. Simultaneously, developers usually have a keen interest in searching for ways to make the development process easier!

1) DEV Motivation: Get Feature M complete and correct as soon as possible

System administrators are like aircraft pilots. They are not going to be doing flips in the air but rather put the highest priority on passenger safety. Any shift in course should be well-documented and proven beforehand so that a steady approach is pursued. The logical hand is key, and thinking about the future is encouraged before adopting a new idea so that it can be efficiently sustained for end users.

2) SYSADMIN Motivation: Make sure Feature M does not decrease uptime upon deployment!

QA analysts are like eye doctors. They examine and look for potential defects that may have been created in the development process. Expanded sets of various tests that allow for early detection are critical, as any defects that get past these gates can potentially reach production! This places a high level of importance on creating detailed test strategies to set excellent opposition to incoming builds, from all angles and directions possible.

3) QA Motivation: Find and resolve as many defects as possible in Feature M, before it hits production

Examining our three motivations above we can conclude a few things. The first is that the more changes developers make, the more they are accomplishing in their route to new features. Another is that the more changes system administrators receive, the higher degree of risk that uptime may be damaged. These two motivations directly contradict each other, and must be addressed effectively in the DevOps model. In a true DevOps strategy, both teams must be held accountable for both of these goals in order to deliver as a single team with one heartbeat and motivation.

When two opposing forces exist, which are typically monolithic teams that develop very strong bonds with each other, then there is no single uniform mindset. This contradicts DevOps and has been how the world of software has been for quite some time. CIOs and other high-ranking leaders who have realized these key contradictions in motivation and take action to correct them may very well be able to enhance their DevOps portfolio without spending a nickel …

… which leaves a lot of extra investment for potentially shifting container and VM workloads off-prem! A future InRhythm blog iteration will cover just this, steering us away from motivation and into the Cloud(s).

Justin Van Wygerden
Cloud & DevOps
InRhythm