/Best Practices

5 Tips To Creating A (Good) Pull Request

- Danijela Vrzan tl;dr: (1) Keep it short. (2) Add more information i.e. the what, why and screenshots. (3) Leave in-line code comments. (4) Assign people or groups as reviewers. (5) Let your colleagues know your PR is ready for review.

featured in #390

Refactor Your Code - Don’t Be Like Southwest Airlines

- Shanea Leven tl;dr: Devs don’t have a way to communicate the complexity hidden in their code to business leaders — they lack code visibility tools. As a result, refactors aren’t prioritized until you have a Southwest-sized crisis. Here’s 9 tips to avoid being southwest.

featured in #384

Logging Practices I Follow

- Eliran Turgeman tl;dr: "There are many pitfall that can lead to useless, wasteful and confusing logs. Therefore I follow a specific set of practices which allows me to write better logs while also being consistent across the system." Eliran discusses here. 

featured in #379

Tips For Analyzing Logs

- Julia Evans tl;dr: 14 useful tips including the following: (1) Search for the request’s ID - often log lines will include a request ID and searching for the request ID of a failed request will show all the log lines for that request. (2) Build a timeline - keeping all of the information straight in your head can get confusing, so keeping a debugging document where I copy and paste bits of information.

featured in #374

Consider Disabling Browser Push Notifications On Family And Friends Devices

- Lloyd Atkinson tl;dr: "A vector for phishing attacks and malware. Your non-technical family members and friends will likely fall for these at some point. For their sake, disable them. If you’re the go-to technology person in your family and friend group, this is a reminder to do this over the festive season."

featured in #372

YAGNI Exceptions

- Luke Plant tl;dr: "I'm essentially a believer in You Aren't Gonna Need It — the principle that you should add features to your software — including generality and abstraction — when it becomes clear that you need them, and not before." Luke points to exceptions to the rule, discussing: (1) Applications of zero one many, (2) Versioning, (3) Logging. And more.

featured in #360

RecSysOps: Best Practices for Operating a Large-Scale Recommender System

- Ehsan Saberian Justin Basilico tl;dr: "In this blog post, we introduce RecSysOps a set of best practices and lessons that we learned while operating large-scale recommendation systems at Netflix. These practices helped us to keep our system healthy while: (1) reducing our firefighting time, (2) focusing on innovations and (3) building trust with our stakeholders."

featured in #360

Lessons Learned from Algorithmic Impact Assessments in Practice

tl;dr: "Understanding algorithmic impact is critical to building a platform that serves hundreds of millions of listeners and creators every day. Our approach includes a combination of centralized and distributed efforts, which drives adoption of best practices across the entire organization — from researchers and data scientists to the engineer pushing the code."

featured in #358

6 Best Practices To Manage Pull Request Creation And Feedback

- Jenna Kiyasu tl;dr: From the engineering team at DoorDash: (1) Write descriptive and consistent names. (2) Create a clear PR title and description. (3) Keep PRs short. (4) Manage PR disagreements through direct communication. (5) Avoid rewrites by getting feedback early. (6) Request additional reviewers to create dialogue. 

featured in #356

9 Enablement Practices To Achieve DevOps At Enterprise Scale

tl;dr: Christian Oestreich, a senior software engineering leader with experience at multiple Fortune 500 companies, shares how to adopt a well-planned metrics-driven strategy that yields better quality code and lowers support costs.

featured in #353