Designing Age-Inclusive Products: Guidelines And Best Practices – I have a 91-year-old grandmother who, in the last 10 years, cannot book a doctor’s appointment herself as she does not use a smartphone and cannot follow voice navigation. Even without a personal perspective, I am very interested in accessibility, and I try to pay attention to inclusivity and accessibility topics wherever relevant. However, I always wonder if those are general best practices or are limited to specific cohorts. Specifically, in this case, younger people usually have more technology literacy than older people and therefore can achieve their goals with less optimized flows and UI.
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2023/07/designing-age-inclusive-products-guidelines-best-practices/
On Becoming VP of Engineering – A two-part blog post series by Emily Nakashima, Honeycomb’s first VP of Engineering. The first part focuses on her path – coming originally from design, frontend, and product engineering and becoming VP of Engineering that also manages the backend and infrastructure.
The second part talks about the day-to-day work and the shift in focus when moving from a director position to a VP position. I strongly agree with her saying, “Alignment is your most important deliverable,” and also think it is one of the hardest things to achieve.
https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/becoming-vp-of-engineering-pt1
https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/becoming-vp-of-engineering-pt2
Project Management for Software Engineers – “This article is a collection of techniques I’ve learned for managing projects over time, that attempts to combine agile best practices with project management best practices.”. While a degree in computer science teaches lots of algorithms, software development, and so on, it does not teach project management and time management. Those skills are usually not required in junior positions but can help you have a more significant impact. Having said that, one should find the exact practices that fit him or her and that can evolve over time.
https://sookocheff.com/post/engineering-management/project-management-for-software-engineers/
Designing Pythonic library APIs – A while ago (2 years+-), I looked for a post/tutorial / etc. regarding designing SDK best practices and could not find something I was happy with. I like the examples (both good and bad examples) in this post. If you are in a hurry, all the take aways are summarized in the end (but sometimes hard to understand without context).
https://benhoyt.com/writings/python-api-design/
Fern – “Fern is an open source toolkit for designing, building, and consuming REST APIs. With Fern, you can generate client libraries, API documentation, and boilerplate for your backend server.”. I haven’t tried it myself yet, but if it works, it seems like cookie-cutter on steroids. In the era of LLMs, the next step is to generate all of those from free text.
Tom Ron 