We can apply Conway’s Law to learn about a company’s structure and values, and the lessons are insightful to insiders & outsiders
Catapulted into most developer’s set of oft-quoted computer laws by The Mythical Man Month, Conway’s Law says:
Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations
Typically when developers mention this, it is to complain about how complicated their current project is while lamenting that change is out of their control. And they’re usually right. But what if this whole time we’ve been looking at Conway’s Law from too narrow of a vantage point.
Rather than typically applying Conway’s Law to our own organization’s code base, we should be using…
tl;dr; Conferences like Minnebar are where you learn things you didn’t know you should learn, so get out there and start attending!
Conferences, especially technology conferences, are a very fascinating lens to see an industry. But attending conferences doesn’t always feel like a logical use of time+money to everyone (especially those who have never been to a conference). On one hand, isn’t every topic something that’s already published online and watchable on YouTube? On the other hand, aren’t the only people who need to network recruiters and jobseekers?
Then you attend a conference and it hits you. Conferences aren’t about the talks. They’re about the talking. They’re about the conversations between sessions. …
Best Buy’s APIs have accepted both plain-text (HTTP) and SSL (HTTPS) API requests for a long time. This year, in the interest of improving everyone’s security & privacy, we’re dropping plain-text support. Here’s the gist of what we’re doing:
- api.remix.bestbuy.com and api.bbyremix.bestbuy.com are going away in favor of api.bestbuy.com
- Starting April 3rd, all HTTP requests will redirect to https://api.bestbuy.com using an HTTP 301 status code redirect. If your current HTTP client doesn’t properly handle 301 redirects, there is a chance this change will break your implementation.
- Starting July 10th, all HTTP requests will receive a status code of 426 (which…
Search. The final frontier. At least for RESTful Web API documentation. And that’s really unfortunate because as the industry realizes APIs are as vital to our systems as HTML, the shortcomings in API documentation are forcing some bad choices:
- Only describe CRUD operations in your API documentation, leaving the R[ead] to be for singletons & have full search outside of the tooling doc
- Under-document your search services, showing only your most used parameters in the documentation
- Bastardize the API to meet the constraints of the documentation (e.g., forcing everything into a q parameter)
This problem came up for me, again…
tl;dr;
Stop trying to hack the Amazon Dash button. Just buy a cheap doorbell, a Raspberry Pi, and solder them together. You’ll get more flexibility and keep some heavy metals out of our landfills.
Now the actual story
James Yu, a co-founder of Parse, said:
Documentation is a layered beast.
Truer words are rarely spoken. And writing blog posts about how to write API documentation is almost as old as the idea of RESTful APIs (one we particularly appreciate is Braintree’s story.) While we’re very big fans of Swagger, sometimes interacting with an API isn’t enough to understand an API — so we have spent the last couple of months thinking about how to make our API documentation more successful.
Then we found Slate and fell in love. And if you’re looking at a solution that’s embraced by…
On September 23, 2008, two technologies were exposed to the world: Best Buy introduced Remix and Google introduced Android. It is no understatement to say both platforms surpassed even the most optimistic early expectations. Although the “Blue Shirt Nation” originally behind Remix has given way to “Renew Blue,” Remix has grown into Best Buy APIs and is growing at a magnificent pace — and I’m thrilled to be joining this high-powered team with an intimidating track record for success.
Who am I? I’m Eric Caron, a Minnesota native and long-time Best Buy fanboi. I believe that just as AJAX…
Now stop abusing it so the rest of us can get back to work.
There is no shortage of advice about email. Some of them are pretty extreme. Some want to destroy it altogether. But I prefer to accept a reality where incremental improvements have a higher probability of success. So I bring to you 6 email principles that you and your company can immediately embrace. This isn’t Nobel Prize material, just smoothed out realizations from the trenches to help you stay sane and effective.
Founding Assumptions
- Email’s purpose is to make business conversations more effective
- Email, done right, can improve the…
