Monday 3-2-1 — anti-limits, pair programming, about pages

Luca Rossi

Jun 6, 2022

Hey, Luca here 👋 welcome to a new format for Refactoring emails!

Many of you have told me that you like the regular articles, but sometimes, when you are really busy, you would prefer something that is shorter and easier to digest.

So, introducing the Monday 3-2-1 ✨

Every Monday I will send you an email like this with 3 short ideas about:

🎽 Engineering Management
🔨 Technical Strategy
🎒 Hiring & Onboarding

You will also keep receiving the regular long form on Thursday, like the last one on engineering productivity.

Let me know if you like it!

1) 🎽 Pair programming makes people happier

Consider the Cockburn and Williams research on pair programming.

80%+ of devs who pair program are happier at work because of it.

It is believed that, being many developers introverted, they would despise pair programming.

As an introvert myself, I can relate. But while it is true that we don't like much interaction, we do crave close interactions with those who are close to our interests.

Pair programming develops deep relationships without being socially overwhelming, which is the best possible scenario for an introvert.

2) 🔨 Design systems based on anti-limits

Engineers are often hypnotized by scaling limits. We design systems preparing them for scenarios that never materialize.

Next time, think at the opposite. Define your anti-limits first: what scale will the app never surpass?

Anti-limits are a form of inversion.

3) 🎒 Make new hires add themselves to the About page

We always talk about making new hires ship production code as soon as possible — but how?

A simple way is to make them add themselves to the company's “About” or “Team” page.

While this is a simple task, it still requires them to:

Setup the dev environment
Locate and update the code
Go through the code review process
Go through the release pipeline

I was taught this by Radoslav Stankov, Head of Engineering at Product Hunt.

That’s it for today — I wish you a great week! 🚀

Luca

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