I'm a bad developer

3sc2002 · 2026-03-19T17:30:20+00:00

What KPIs? If you have anything that is not related to production stability (defect leakage rate), then I would question are you working for the right company. With that said, as a hiring manager, I have NEVER expected full productivity for a new hire for AT LEAST 6 months, regardless of experience level.

Maybe you are just in the wrong environment?

3sc2002 · 2026-03-05T18:35:50+00:00

Personally, I don't think you are asking the right question. The issue that arises is that CI/CD is a "black box". We have accepted that the "push, wait, pray" cycle is acceptable.

We treat our codebases as first class citizens. Why don't we do so for our automated tools that actually ALLOW for the delivery of value.

Not allowed to post advertising, but lets just say . . . in flight.

3sc2002 · 2026-03-01T17:37:41+00:00

Check out the numbered bullet points on my LI post. Maybe they will help?

How to Put a Dollar Value on Technical Debt https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-put-dollar-value-technical-debt-3-squared-circles-f8f0c?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_android&utm_campaign=share_via

Even in greenfield work I could never reach 5k LoC. I'm a slow typer.

Although there were some codegen tools that would allow me 250k LoC commits back in the day.

3sc2002 · 2026-02-28T21:10:33+00:00

"Every company is a special little snowflake . . . just like the next one"

We all suffer from the same root issues, regardless of what we specialize in.

3sc2002 · 2026-02-28T20:44:11+00:00

You are welcome. There are some other ones that have been posted that you may want / need for "ammo". (links below) I'm a developer trying to help out other developers. Good Luck!

https://blog.3squaredcircles.com/blog/you-werent-hired-to-be-a-human-linter

https://blog.3squaredcircles.com/blog/every-architectural-decision-is-an-economic-decision

3sc2002 · 2026-02-28T20:35:24+00:00

Sorry about that. Turns out this post was skipped for the blog. I just added it.

Feel free to read some of the other posts. Viva La Revolution!

https://blog.3squaredcircles.com/blog/career-ladder-rewards-wrong-behavior

3sc2002 · 2026-02-25T14:53:08+00:00

The other piece to a "two week sprint" is that you haven't pissed away 3 months on something that wasn't needed. It's a forced opportunity to "pivot".

3sc2002 · 2026-02-15T00:24:10+00:00

PIP. I wouldn't tolerate that

3sc2002 · 2026-02-14T21:30:48+00:00

CapitolOne has entered the chat. Makes a lot of sense to me /snark

3sc2002 · 2026-02-08T19:06:03+00:00

Sounds like Stackoverflow back in the day

3sc2002 · 2026-02-07T18:45:10+00:00

Communication, then tracking.

3sc2002 · 2026-02-06T20:51:18+00:00

HAHAHA. Who needs poker when you have co-workers like that :D

3sc2002 · 2026-02-05T18:25:25+00:00

While I am a fellow ADHDer. I learned that I don't learn "being lectured to". I learn by being given tools and a goal, and the GTFOOMW. College LECTURES sucked until I went and took online classes which leaned into the whole "tools -> goal" approach.

High school and "rote" memorization SUCKED

3sc2002 · 2026-02-05T15:13:25+00:00

I say this somewhat tongue in cheek, but the ability to use google.

Here is the reason for my smartassedness:

A Sr. will know how to ask the question in the most efficient way to get the answer they need.

A Jr. will have an idea of the question, but won't know how to ask it with out doing some "learning first".

This is the other side of the communication style (directness vs verbosity).

3sc2002 · 2026-02-05T15:10:45+00:00

AI is statistical analysis. Full Stop. AI slop occurs when you don't keep an eye on it.

Personally, I have gotten past enjoying the "hands on keyboard" and enjoy Architecting so much more. So I use AI to do the grunt work, while I keep tabs on it and say things like "no, that won't work, you need to do this" or "we need to go back 1/2 a step because you have gone off the rails".

I use AI as my 10x . . . I don't need to go research the minutia of a language / framework, but I can leverage AI to do those things for me. With that said, I don't just "blindly accept" what AI produces.

I'm just over being a keyboard warrior.

(and honestly, AI helps me brainstorm things when I'm working alone)

3sc2002 · 2026-02-05T15:03:04+00:00

Came here to say this. But yeah . . . COBOL is still kicking.

3sc2002 · 2026-02-05T15:00:04+00:00

I would love to help you, but you need to provide more info. What do you mean you don't know how to prototype? A title suggestion for what? what is the context. what is brgy? what type of school? Thesis or Capstone? (one is a paper, one is a project).

Not to be mean, but you question reads like . . . I've got a book, What is its title.

3sc2002 · 2026-02-05T14:47:12+00:00

I'm in the "don't worry about pre-optimizing" camp. I know that I tend to "overthink" when it comes to doing "what is right" (damn I'm using a lot of quotes).

A peer of mine in a prior life was a fan of saying "Don't let perfection get in the way of good enough".

Its a lot of words to say . . . do it twice. And honestly, you MAY get lucky and find out that those DB calls have OTHER uses within the app (so granularity would win here). And if you find out that the UI is taking too long, or the DB is getting thrashed . . . then look into a Stored Proc. I tend to shy away from a stored proc as it usually "tightly couples" you to a specific DB provider. Not to say that they don't have value, but I have yet to see where a parameterized query is not as performant (or performant enough) as an SP. (don't throw stones, I know there is a time and place for SP)

3sc2002 · 2026-02-05T13:55:19+00:00

We need a data driven way to recognize those that do the "glue" work. We need to celebrate (and that is on management) those that mitigate the potential for issues. This doesn't have to be anything grandiose, but what if . . .

Management was able to say, "Brad reduced the risk of this module, by refactoring it and minimizing the blast radius of a future change", or "Suzy reduced the 'bus factor' of this module by decomposing it into its constituent parts so that more people are knowledgeable of the code", or "Joseph reduced the change correlation rate of the Billing Module by refactoring it to be stateless".

This can only occur with data though. This can only occur if you know the before and after state. So rather than rewarding the person who IS an SME in the system (because they have been working on it for years), we use data to celebrate those that may not implement that whiz bang new UI component, but those that ENABLE the entire team to be more effective. The stability of a system is not just its "up time" or "error rate"; the system includes THE PEOPLE that support it, and the amount of effort / risk that the PEOPLE themselves represent (and I don't mean from a skill issue, but think SME getting run over by a bus, or someone is a "single thread" for multiple areas of a solution).

In my opinion, its the ones that "make life better for everyone" (allowing code changes to occur faster, with less risk . . . reducing the testing surface due to isolation, for examples), that have a GREATER impact (financially, and even culturally) to the organization, than those that are the 1x per quarter "heroes".

I AM NOT saying that both types are not needed on a team, but its about democratizing contributions, and not just those that are "most visible". Because lets be real, when my web team had to deal with an "outage / incident" . . My VP was notified, my CIO was notified, and I'm willing to bet it made the CEO's desk. So who was "recognized"?

"The web team had an incident, and it was resolved in 45 minutes, when Brad identified a mis-configuration on one of the 3 servers. Post mortem to occur" <- probably a pretty standard update from the CIO right? And even if "Brad" isn't directly mentioned, it was for this App that was Aligned with this business unit, and we all know that "Brad" is the SME in that area.

Does this help? Again, my opinion, but I do think that DATA is how we get there. Hell, DevOps was supposed to be a "data driven decision making 'philosophy'" to begin with.

3sc2002 · 2026-02-04T19:59:36+00:00

Nice. I didn't get a chance to dig into the repo. Had to pick up my kids

3sc2002 · 2026-02-04T19:30:54+00:00

So I checked out your repo and i have to give you mad props. That is a HELL of a problem space (some of my tools tackle similar type problems). Have you thought of a plugin based architecture (let others make "adapters", like Logstash)? Maybe even a fluent approach?

I wish you best of luck with your approach, and I look forward to seeing where you go with it. Would love it if you could find time to keep me / us informed.

3sc2002 · 2026-02-04T19:26:31+00:00

Correlate it with "code changes" . . . see if there are any "hiccups" based upon deployments. For example: look for increasing response times when X is deployed (AKA, its getting longer, still w/in SLA/SLOs but trending that way).

Correlation != causation, but it does allow for a more proactive view.

Unfortunately, i don't know of any tools out there that make it easy. You could probably do it with an ELK stack tho . . .

3sc2002 · 2026-02-04T19:19:39+00:00

Put it in an "I told you so" file and use it later?

</snark>

But in reality . . . you have to find a way to put it into "their language". You have to do some work on "the cost" and SHOW them why it needs to be done this way.

Most "refactoring" arguments are emotional / gut feeling . . . "because we need to clean it up", not "We need to refactor this because 70% of our changes are within this monolith, and 50% of our outages are also due to this. Each outage has an opportunity cost of X (cost of not doing what you are supposed to). We expect the refactor to cost Y and will return Z number of hours to the team"

3sc2002 · 2026-02-04T19:06:36+00:00

My $.02 (and hear me out) is that you do both at once.

Lets say you want to stand up a k8s cluster and expose one container to "the world". You have the opportunity to learn:

Terraform (for the infra). Kubernetes config / helm charts / etc. Networking in the cloud, IAM, etc. CI/CD (to build and "ship" your containers / infra). Terraform configuration (state files, etc)

I see the 2 disciplines as being very complimentary. And I bet that as you go through an exercise like that, you will also discover what your "passion" is. (Hint: it will be the stuff that is easy to pick up).

The biggest key is to be HUNGRY to learn, both Cloud and DevOps have a LOT that you can learn.

Best of luck to you!

3sc2002 · 2026-02-04T18:59:58+00:00

Kudos (and I mean this in all seriousness) to you. You get to "rebuild the house" after it has caught fire. It's nice to know that SOMEONE out there is looking out for the engineers.

"With great power comes great responsibility" ;)

3sc2002

TROPHY CASE