Fell Sunderland

🌟Big news from Flexiana🌟 We’re kicking off some awesome new Clojure projects this year,, and we still have experienced Clojure teams ready to take on more. Here’s the deal: 🛠 Our teams are packed with senior devs who’ve been working with Clojure for 5–10 years. We’re not just about writing code—we deliver clean, maintainable solutions tailored to your needs. 🌐 We’ve got expertise in web apps, functional programming, and even integrating Clojure with Python for AI projects. 🔧 We’re all about using the best tools for the job, drawing from a tech stack that spans 25+ programming languages (yes, we’re nerds like that). Why work with us? ✅ You’ll be working with senior-only teams—no juniors learning on the job here! ✅ We use agile methods, so we can pivot and adapt with you as needed. ✅ We’ve nailed projects in fintech, ERPs, web apps, mobile—you name it. If you’ve got a Clojure project in mind or just want to chat about ideas, let’s talk! We’d love to help you bring your vision to life. For a glimpse into our team's experience, check out this video:

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What is a TypeScript Engineer? I keep seeing this pop up in recruitment posts, which means clients are asking for it...right? Has this replaced the FullStack Engineer, which, lets be honest, meant a NodeJS developer. That was back in the good old days when it was only NodeJS. Now we have Bun, Deno, Hono and more. Or perhaps its asking for a Javascript developer...whatever that means in todays world of a thousand js frameworks and evolving ES standards. Or are they actually asking for a Java developer, because someones used Gen AI along the way and it got confused between Java and Javascript (*shudders*) Are they seriously in need of a type system engineer, thats kinda niche. It's hard enough trying to explain what you do as a job to "normal" folk as it is, without this level of obfuscation. How would you even explain this when asked "What do you do?". Do kids nowadays needs to consider themselves experts in everything inside package.json to land a job? When will the industry move beyond this fixation on specific languages? I get it, it's an important consideration, but asking for Typescript Engineers...it's not going to help you find the devs you actually need.

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Myself and others at Crafted will be talking at #DenverStartupWeek sharing strategies to adapt to the SaaS rollercoaster 🎢 of the past 18 months. In our talk we're planning to discuss: 🔍 Business Context - WTF is going on in SaaS right now, we'll share some curated data 📊 Why the Business Context matters - Companies are struggling with profitability and growth curves in an era of scarcity 🛠️ How this impacts Product Development teams working hard to do more with less 🎯 What teams can do about it to take their destiny back - delighting both a company’s users AND their boards. Now more than ever, #focus is key and we will share a #framework and #stories to help teams #build what matters. We are community driven and open to feedback - please help us tailor the talk for maximum impact! 👉 What resonates? 👉 What would you like to hear about that is not represented above? Register for our talk here: https://lnkd.in/gkxzTCKJ

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Highly recommend this course for anyone who wants to wrangle, ahem I mean develop, people brilliantly!

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The secrets of how experienced engineering leaders accelerating growth of new Tech Leads... 𝘔𝘪𝘯𝘥𝘴𝘦𝘵 + 𝘗𝘦𝘳𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 + 𝘚𝘶𝘱𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵 + 𝘍𝘦𝘦𝘥𝘣𝘢𝘤𝘬 = 𝗦𝘂𝗰𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗠𝗶𝗻𝗱𝘀𝗲𝘁 Individual focus → 𝗧𝗲𝗮𝗺 𝗳𝗼𝗰𝘂𝘀 𝗣𝗲𝗿𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗘𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 I love Andy Grove's definition 𝘓𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘫𝘶𝘥𝘨𝘦𝘥 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘶𝘵𝘱𝘶𝘵𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘵𝘦𝘢𝘮𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘦𝘢𝘮𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘪𝘯𝘧𝘭𝘶𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦. Although I prefer to use the term 𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘀. It's possible for a team to product a lot of output but not much value! 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗮 𝗧𝗲𝗰𝗵 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗱? A team scoped Tech Lead can have many flavours. Is team leadership included? What about line management? What about delivery? Clarity is key 𝗦𝘂𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁 Engineer → Tech Lead is a tricky transition. Holding more frequent 1:1's initially Seek feedback from team Stay close 𝗙𝗲𝗲𝗱𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸 We all make mistakes when taking on new responsibilities  Provide both reenforcing and corrective feedback Observations + Impact = Actionable feedback Learn from mistakes Celebrate the wins P.S How do you support new Tech Leads?

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I'm working with a team in Go and they have these "err != nil checks" everywhere. To me it's a really big smell. I'm not familiar enough with Go to know better though. Feels like in the InitialCall if there's an error a Functional Null Object Pattern should apply. Any Golang experts want to offer up some constructive help? Note, everything has been abstracted out, so don't try to make too much sense of what the code is doing.

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Praying to the altar of holy DATA to make any decision in an organization is an insidious disease. It feels like the right thing to do, but when you get down to it, the data is just there to cover your ass if you're wrong. Speed matters, weeks and months matter, and non-measurables also matter. Good leadership isn't about doing what the data dashboards tell you to do. It's understanding that sometimes you have to make gut decisions FAST, and being willing to eat the result, whatever may come. Great leaders have great instincts, they act them on quickly, and they take full accountability for the results.

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The 2024 StackOverflow survey is out, and for the 8th year in a row, Clojure has ranked near the podium in the Top Paying Technologies category—often occupying rank 1. I don't talk much about why I choose to use a weird Lisp—mostly because nobody cares—but the results speak for themselves. If you can hold your nose long enough to learn something very different, you'll find yourself in a high-productivity environment that features: 🔥 Hot code reloading 🦆 Dynamic typing ♻️ Best-in-class garbage collection 📂 Highly performant immutable data structures 📚 Access to the entire JVM's ecosystem of libraries 🧩 Cross-platform compilation to JavaScript 🧠 An unbelievably smart and humble community Sure, you'll pay a high mental price to learn the language, but as a reward, employers will pay a high price for *you*.

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I am not religious but I always liked the old joke about the devout man who, during a flood, was so convinced God would save him that he ignored the warnings to go to higher ground, ignored a man in a boat offering to save him, ignored a rescue helicopter after he fled to his roof. He eventually drowns and when he gets to heaven he demands an explanation from God to which God replies "I send you a warning, a boat and a rescue helicopter, what more do you want!" I think of this joke when I see the seemingly endless "Agile sucks" and "Kill Agile" posts floating around on social media these days. And when I read the posts what they describe at these companies does sound pretty horrific. Dozens of meetings each week. Lengthy seemingly pointless stand-ups. Planning meetings that stretch well into the evening. I can appreciate that this is not a pleasant experience for engineers. It would certainly feel like something is fundamentally "wrong" in such an organisation, and why at first glance this can seem like this is because of Agile. A key point I think that is often missed though is that a central component of Agile is visibility and when you make things visible you surface dysfunction. This is a feature, not a bug, of Agile. Blaming Agile for this dysfunction, rather than examining what is being surfaced, is a waste of the opportunity. When your company's version of Agile eventually kills you and you get to heaven and demand of God to explain this Agile thing He inflicted upon the world God will not doubt say "I sent you Agile, you saw dozens of meetings, hour long stand-ups, planning meetings that stretched well into the evening and you STILL didn't fix the dysfunction in your company, what more do you want!". The question you should be asking is not "can we dump Agile" but rather "why does this feel awful". What is being surfacing now and how can we tackle it. Because it was always there, it was just invisible before. There are probably dozens of reasons why your stand-up is an hour long and none of them are "... because of Agile". If you work at a company that has no capacity to identify and fix these when they surface, no culture of continuous improvement or desire to tackle the "why" rather than the "what", then simply getting rid of Agile and making this all invisible again is not going to change anything fundamental. Something to think about. If you are interested in working in a company that does embrace this philosophy and is interested in continuously re-examining the "why" then check this out: https://lnkd.in/dHBNyTrG

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Clojure Conj 2024 was an excellent time. It's so much fun to see the community get together and share experiences and new ideas. Conj stands as evidence that although the Clojure ecosystem is smaller than others, Clojure is not only alive and well, but it's relied on for mission critical software in the field across so many industries and domains. To name a few: Healthcare, Finance, Scientific Research, Productivity Tools, Databases, Business Intelligence, Ad Tech, and more. It's a serious tool for serious business and that's great news for those who choose to wield it. Let's continue to create Clojure jobs that pay well and that offer opportunities to work on hard problems and unique challenges long into the future. #clojure #software #developers

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So I seem to started this screencast thingy with Raymond McDermott. We've embarked on building a CMS in Clojure, and we're starting very much from scratch. There is a small twist to this, which is that we want to defer any decision to adopt technology for as long as possible. So rather than discussing which routing library to use, what database we're going to have to set up and so on, we just start coding in a remote repl. Enjoy (or not) https://lnkd.in/dHUWwfjH

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Why do I favour practices like developer testing, TDD, refactoring and continuous integration? It's to enable rapid & sustained evolution of production-ready software. The odds of delivering the right thing in a single pass are so remote that many iterations are likely required. And even when we hit the bullseye, it's almost always a moving target. Not least because putting software into an environment has a tendency to change that environment and the problems we need to solve.

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At #LeadDevBerlin now we hear from Lisa Karlin Curtis about how we’re all doing service catalogs wrong. Why build a catalog? - connective map of everything in your organisation - database of services, teams, connections - know who to page when something goes wrong - be ready for audit consistently rather than in a last minute rush Why is it so difficult? - hard to get list of services in the first place - some early assumptions were wrong anyway - you need to change your approach based on feedback, so now you need to chase everyone again - people’s first interaction with the service catalog is often a really really negative one as it doesn’t deliver immediate value to their team - hard to keep up to date - decide to launch to get out of the neverending spiral of data collection & chasing - 6mo later run a survey on the catalog and the response is underwhelming What went wrong? - unclear objectives - lack of buy-in / needing loads of social capital - data decay How can we do better? - focus on the problem not the solution - deliver a minimum valuable product - ship incrementally, focus on incremental value - remember data is not the goal 🥅 - find a team to be your champions (one with some capacity, connection, ability to be good customers) - remember any data that isn’t being used will rot - use the data! That will stop it going stale - the data must be easy to update Takeaways: - clarity is key - start with a single team (prioritise depth over breadth) - always use your data & make it easy to update What if we’re thinking about this whole problem upside-down? - the catalog is the means not the end - focus on solving the real problems, knowing the catalog will be a major part of the solution - start small & iterate, let the catalog emerge over time based on what you need as a side effect - incidents are a good place to start! Instant value, and there’s probably some sort of solution already

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Thinking of taking a Team / Tech Lead role? Might be worth thinking again... Unless you have a burning desire to Lead and Manage teams full time down the line (in an Eng Manager, VP, Head of or CTO level position), taking a Team/Tech Lead role is likely a BIG mistake. Sure, you might get a bit of title prestige, but with it comes a few major negatives that for most will significantly outweigh the pros... - Tech Lead type positions are currently at the bottom of the list in terms of demand from companies. - Tech Lead salaries are (for the most part) sitting below Senior Eng salaries in the current market - Tech Leads (perhaps wrongly, but I don't make the rules) are often considered to be less sharp technically than their more hands on colleagues - Tech Leads will generally have a much harder time switching to a Staff or Principal level position in the future (again, perhaps wrongly, but it's true nonetheless) - Tech Leads are often the first to go in redundancies, with preference regularly shown to more hands on Senior Engineers - And finally, most people don't actually like it. Leading and Managing is a slog, and all the fun parts (mentoring, leading by example, high level decision making etc.) can often be done as a Senior, Staff or Principal Engineer anyway. (This is what we are seeing in start-ups and scale-ups, your mileage may vary in the corporate world).

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Leading Cross-Org Tech Reviews Josie has written a great post about driving a cross-org multi-team tech review practice. It's very focussed, as only senior principal-level engineers are usually tasked with those projects. I do think that org leaders as well as senior engineers will benefit from reading the article and adopting the best practices described there. It's also an excellent example of how to scale one person's efforts across multiple team, and thus applies to more than just tech surveys. Project planning, roadmaps, and tech explorations all have the common characteristic of standardized templates, parallel execution, and open questions. Read on here: https://lnkd.in/gX6bnXzq

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In case you missed it while prepping for Flag Day 🇺🇸 Happy State of Engineering Management Report Day happened this week! The annual thought leadership piece from Jellyfish has dropped. Hear from Engineering leaders, managers and frontline ICs .... we cover a range of topics that matter to great R&D leaders. Key Points: 1️⃣ Engineers are now strategic partners! 🙌 2️⃣ Burnout continues to be a challenge 😱 3️⃣ The talent shortage is spiking back up. 4️⃣ Many teams have embraced #AI 🧠 5️⃣ Others have legit concerns about AI ⁉ If #developerproductivity #genAI #engineeringexcellence are important to you .... have a read! (link in the Comments)

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Some people gaslight themselves (and others) into requiring the London Underground of 'software development' processes to then never release anything, or something the market doesn't want. My company has literally 0 process, and I challenge anyone to make a better product than us in <6 months using these "agile" frameworks. You'll be in your third round of RFP's, seeking board approval by then. Don't believe me? Check the app, and get back to me: https://us.idyllic.app/ Before using the classic consulting line: "but how does it scale?" -- Yes, we scaled the app to over 10k-20k DAU in that time as well comfortably 😂. The app is ready for the next million users. How is writing those user stories going? #tech #startup #product #ai #agile

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