🐢Frank M. Taylor

🤔 if you say trunk based development won’t work because it requires excellent engineers… 😢What are you saying about your current team? I love trunk based development because it’s a GREAT way to train newbie devs. The more jr, the better - I am not kidding. You want to gel a new team fast? Push. To. Main. Daily. Aim for 100% build success in CI from main every day from multiple devs, on main. Does it require other practices and principles? Yes, absolutely, but this idea that it requires engineering excellence… well that’s driven from leaders, full stop. If you’re a leader saying trunk based dev won’t work for your team because they’re not good enough or the other processes aren’t in place - ask yourself why you wouldn’t set that as the goal, strive for excellence, and start working towards it today? It is your technical and process debt - start paying it down🤷‍♂️ What rationale is there as a professional manager and leader of engineers, building valuable products, in NOT investigating and pursuing ideas from DORA or other research-based organizations? #meatbasedengineer

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When did senior engineers start acting like every task needs to be fully scoped for them? Lately, I’ve heard devs say they want “clean Jira tickets.” Let’s be honest about what that really means: No ambiguity. No product thinking. No ownership. Just code. Preferably handed to them in a neat little box. If that’s the kind of work you’re looking for, there are places for it: internal IT at a bank, government contracts, legacy systems in maintenance mode. But if you’re working in a product company—especially a startup or scale-up—that posture won’t get you far. The job is messy. The requirements do change. The customer will contradict themselves. That’s why we need engineers who lean into the ambiguity, not away from it. This is exactly why I wrote Product Driven. Too many teams are optimizing for clean tickets instead of customer outcomes. But product thinking isn’t a “nice to have.” It’s the job. I break down what that looks like and how to lead for it in the book. 👉 https://buff.ly/1W4AoCz

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If you’re planning to modernize a legacy system that's been running for years and still manages a high volume of client traffic, the strangler fig pattern might be something that can help. Read Martin Fowler's blog post about the Strangler Fig pattern application. https://lnkd.in/gxKMuQ5G https://lnkd.in/gMxK3KUS If you’ve walked this path, what tipped your decision one way or another? #modernization #StranglerFig #SRE #softwarearchitecture #engineeringmanagement

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Will AI make testers obsolete? ...but we never asked that when Selenium came out. Or Cypress. Or Jenkins. Chainsaws didn’t kill lumberjacks. Excavators didn’t eliminate construction crews. PEX crimpers didn’t wipe out plumbers. Tools don’t eliminate roles. Roles evolve with them. Alongside programming, AI will change testing. In fact, it already is. But we’ll still need people who know the product, see the edge cases, and think like users. The title might shift. The tools might upgrade. But the craft? Still very much alive.

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I've criticized places I've worked in the past for trying to assume "a developer is a developer is a developer". Same thing applies to Shopify saying "a designer is a designer is a designer". Not that there aren't benefits to a 10,000ft view of a particular job role. And I do think that we're moving into a period where being a generalist is becoming more valuable again. But the difference in focus and output of a UX designer versus a UI designer is (or should be) significant. Just as a back-end developer and a front-end engineer also work on different parts of the same thing. If the internal understanding and classification is robust, then sure. If it's not, then you'll have experts in user flows being assigned to design icons, just as on the development side we've seen Java developers wrestle to deliver badly-optimized presentation layer experiences in code. Management and executive leadership (...or is it all "management" now?) needs to understand the nuance of different skills within a high-level discipline - and understand that not just now, but in the future when managers and team members change and move around.

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5 ARIA attributes every dev should know (and 2 to avoid) Most developers know ARIA exists, but which attributes actually matter for everyday accessibility work? Before we get started, remember the first rule of ARIA: Don't use ARIA unless you have to. If semantic HTML can do the job, use that instead. But when you do need ARIA, here are 5 ARIA attributes that are actually useful: 1. aria-labelledby - Describe the current element with the text from another element on the page. Better than aria-label because it allows you to reference existing visible text on the page and keep it translatable. 2. aria-describedby - Connects help text, error messages, or extra context to form fields and other elements. Screen readers announce this after the main label. 3. aria-expanded - Essential for dropdowns, accordions, mobile menus - anything that opens and closes. Bonus: pair it with aria-controls to define which element it's controlling. 4. aria-current - Perfect for programatically defining the current page in navigation, active step in a process, or current item in pagination. Much clearer than visual styling alone. 5. aria-live - Announces dynamic updates to screen readers. Use "polite" for status messages, "assertive" for urgent alerts. Two to avoid (or use carefully and thoughtfully): 1. aria-label - It's typically a better choice to choose another way to label elements, with text inside a button tag, a label tag associated with a form field, or visible text associated with the aria-labelledby attribute. Treat aria-label as a last resort when no other method of labeling an element can be used. 2. role - Most of the time, there's no need for that role attribute when you use semantic HTML. Skip adding role="button" on a div - just use a button tag. A proper heading tag doesn't need a heading role or an aria-level attribute. The best accessibility starts with good semantic HTML. ARIA is intended to fill in the gaps, not replace the foundation. What ARIA attributes do you find most useful? Any that trip up your team?

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Still sitting on a Xamarin project and wondering how you'll get it to .NET? I put together some Skills to help. Add them to your GitHub Copilot or Claude setup and invoke them when planning out the remainder of your migration. Whether you're starting from zero or mid-migration, these should be helpful. https://lnkd.in/evUtEHdA

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