Essential Links in October 2021

After a year without any event, the world's biggest boardgame fair opened their doors again in Essen. A little bit smaller in size, less people, masks, distance rules ... but: boardgames, tabletops, rpgs - oh, my! I was able to go there 3 out of 4 days and it felt good. A little bit weird and awkward, but overall funny, entertaining, inspiring. I was able to collect the Paleo extension and a lot of other stuff, that will carry us through the winter time. Can't wait to play it all.

However, there was lots of things going on this month, too. Facebook, Insta and WhatsApp went down. A new government is formed in Germany. So here is what happened in the digital world this month.

Articles

• There can't be a month without David Burkus. This time, he helps us to understand what most leaders get wrong about culture.
• A look at the Tuckman model of forming, norming, storming and performing when it comes to agile teams.
• October started with a bang! Facebook was offline, Whatsapp was not available, Instagram was down! One of the largest network infrastructures in the internet could not be reached. How could that happen? You might have your own opinion whether you like Facebook and their products or not - but for us techies this was definitely a major event. Cloudflare came up with a post-mortem and Facebook soon followed. They even brought up some more details. It's interesting and a little bit inspiring to take a peek into these layers of complexity and size.
• ACID in software engineering stands for atomic, consistency, isolation and durability and describes a state concept of data validity in a system. Think if the buzzword single source of truth. Here is an article series by Uwe Friedrichsen on the architectural misconceptions that could arise when trying to achieve ACID data states. (Part Two, Three)
• Logging is often the key to be able to do forensics. Here are the 10 commandments of logging.
• Forecasting efforts and timelines is always difficult. Especially if you are working in an uncertain context (as most agile teams are). So here are some resources on using the Monte Carlo method for forecasting with a probability factor.
• Steve Blank tells us about who you will need on your startup team.
• And here again, Steve tells us why innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization.
• Roger Martin on dealing with fear and how it affects our work and how to reduce it.
• There is a beautiful little thread on refactoring by @jezhumble. There‘s a difference between a 10 minute refactoring as part of TDD and changing system behavior during a redesign.
• Story Points and estimations based on the Fibonacci sequence is a strong toolset to help with ambiguity and complexity. Here‘s a great guide on how to use estimations and the Fibonacci sequence in your planning.
• Jeff Gothelf does not write just another OKR article. He dissects the practices and give you helpful approaches and tools how to make them work.
• Here‘s a great entry into the Mastodon fediverse.

About System Thinking

Understanding systems at work is one of the most powerful capability of being aware of your environment. Only if you see the systems you are able to interact with them and - if necessary - eventually change them.

• When starting out with systems thinking, you have to understand how elements of a system are interconnected.
• Here‘s an article on using a system-thinking approach in the redesign on the public services for becoming a teacher in the UK by the Department of Education. The policy team started to think about their policies from the perspective of the ones, who have to implement them: the teachers.
• You should use the Business Model Canvas to design a business around the systems you have analysed.

About APIs

I read a lot on APIs this month (again). For me, a proper API architecture and lifecycle management is one of the keys to a modern Information Technology. So here are a few important articles on APIs.

• One of the most important resources is the book "APIs you won't hate".
• When you discover APIs and their characters, you should read on the Robustness Principles.
• Here are Zalando's API guidelines, which are a good read to get an idea about APIs.
• Here is the same type of documentation by Commercetools.
• And if you think, you have it all sorted out ... have you heard of grpc?

Side notes and more interesting stuff

• Did you know? Critical Role started its 3rd campaign in Exandria in October. Be sure to follow one of the most inspiring roleplaying stream on earth on Critical Role Twitch.tv channel or Critical Role YouTube channel.