Oliver Schwarz, developer, agile professional and software architect near Cologne, Germany

I travelled less this month. We saw the launch of GPT-4 and a lot of buzz around it. My Mastodon usage surpassed Twitter this month for the first time. I did small updates to my website in order to decrease the size of it and make it lightning fast to load.

A bowl of Ramen with vegetables on a wooden table

Other than that I put more efforts into curating my links. I spent more time on these articles and left comments here and there, because I love that we people simply can share our knowledge in an open environment. I hope you enjoy these, too.

Agile

Scrum takes a lot of focus on becoming resilient and adaptive to effects in your environment. In a podcast episode on scrum.org, Andreanna Marshall and Scott Adams take a deeper look on the risk management capabilities of Scrum.
Canvasses are all the rage (and a little bit stale lately IMHO). However, if Alexey Krivitsky is doing a canvas, you may want to take a look at it. Here is his Agile Coaching Canvas.
Scaling agile is one of the most heated discussions I witnessed in the last year. Here is Alexey's view on why you should not scale, but descale your org.

CSS

I never thought I would link to web development resources again, but here we are :) Here's Ryan Trimble with a collection of his favourite css snippets. These are very helpful.

Leadership

Lena Reinhard on efficiency and effectiveness in your engineering team and what leaders can do about it.

Organisation

Org Topologies is an interesting take and approach on organizational design by org coaches Alexey Krivitsky and Roland Flemm.
Teams are timeboxed communities of practice. Heidi Helfand is author of the fantastic book Dynamic Reteaming. In April she offers a 4-day cohort-based course on her learnings. Sign up until April, 13th.
Chris Heilmann and his take on why a back to office movement is not a valid solution anymore.

On writing

I had this here before and I am still intrigued by the wonderful concept of keeping your own Digital Garden. Maggie Appleton has written a beautiful and extensive article on keeping your knowledge.
GPT-4 is not an AI. However, the borders seem to fade. Shane Parrish on Farnam Street is wondering why you still should bother writing.

Being human

You experience what you want to experience. A mind-boggling description of how our brain constructs our conscious reality by Jeremy Keith.

Software Development

Pair programming and programming in groups is in my view one of the most underrated practices in software development. In highly complex environments where information is created quicker than you are able to share it, pair programming can do the trick of unobtrusively sharing knowledge and enable code ownership. Pairing work is not limited to programming, though. You can pair almost any work so you may want to give it a try.

The Mob Mentality Show is a great YouTube channel on many aspects around software development - but with a focus on pair and mob programming.
In a podcast episode, James Shore, Woody Zuill and Chris Lucian talk about the practice and the background of pairing and mobbing.
The liberators list the pros and cons of pair programming, talk about the costs and the acceptance and what you should have in mind when starting out.
Sometimes it's really good to follow engineering blogs. This time, shopify tell us how good documentation can increase productivity.
Last week I listened to an episode of the Software Engineering Radio with Alex Hidalgo. Alex co-wrote the Site Reliability Engineering handbook. Alex talks about Service Level Indicators, Service Level Objectives and Error Budgets and I can highly recommend this talk recordings.
Mid of March, Reddit had an outage. And they did a fascinating drilldown of what happened. This is a very good example of a written post mortem.
James Shore does software engineering workshops and trainings. In a mastodon thread he shares his insights how to do trainings with different levels of experiences. Is there an unroll app for mastodon by the way?

Tools

If you have seen the great movie Don't Look Up you may have stumbled across the term First Principle Thinking. It's about dropping all the assumptions and starting out from known facts.
Miro introduces Miro AI. I dislike the term AI and I understand how much it has become a marketing gig. Just go with it. Test it out, it will help you create more sticky notes on your canvas, before you abandon just another board.
If you are looking for a portable laptop stand, here is one.
Trello has a template for a Team Focus Board that you can use if you are getting into OKR.
Elk is a web-based, generic mastodon client in the making. I love what I see so far.

User Experience

Jens Scharnetzki, Chief Product Owner at Yello Strom, explains Journey Mapping as a tool to drive customer centric thinking in your product & service design.
On Google's web.dev there is an extensive article with everything you need to know to understand how images are working in the web.

Inspiration

Andy Bell is a web designer (is this old term still valid) that I have been following for a long, long time. And he is the founder of https://set.studio/ Set Studio that have a stunning website. Go there, take a look at it, play with it. It's beautiful. Andy breaks down the creation process and considerations for you.
Dark Horse publishes the Future Organization Playbook. I still love their book about workspace design. Yep, it goes to my bedside pile.

Thanks for reading so far. I hope you have a great month of April.