As an individual contributor, manager and general DevRel presence over the years, I’ve developed some tactics both for myself and my team, and I’d like to share them in case they’re useful to others. Also since I’m moving to a less DevRel role, writing this down while I can still think about it! Continue reading
Improve Existing OpenAPI Descriptions
I also live in the real world, where OpenAPI descriptions get generated from existing codebases, and engineering teams lack either the knowledge or the enthusiasm to modernise their processes. With a generated OpenAPI description, everything else that OpenAPI enables is likely to be disappointing, because the description only contains the information that was in the serverside code, and if you’re lucky some comment metadata. Enter OpenAPI Overlays, a way to describe alterations to an existing OpenAPI description that can be reapplied every time that description changes. Continue reading
Manager’s Secret Second Calendar
Generating a nice-looking PDF with Pandoc
Sphinx extensions for developer portals
Internal DevRel: Colleague Enablement
Outline your writing to ease the creative process
Who are you writing that commit message for?
Next time you write a commit message, try some of these suggestions as your imaginary audience:
- Yourself, next week, when you finally get back to working on this thing and can’t remember where you were up to
- Yourself, when you get a pull request review and can’t remember which commit something is in that needs to be removed
- Yourself, debugging how this ended up like this, 6 months from now
- Your colleague, eyeballing your work to see how you are getting on
Personally, I think of it as a note to myself. Like an alibi, if someone asks you what’s already been done, or what this commit that removes one specific line from a long config file. Yes, I worked as a git consultant for a while, the delete-a-single-line with the commit message “Fixed” is always the culprit!
Further reading: https://cbea.ms/git-commit/
Weekly Planning with Obsidian
Keeping your finger on the (digital) pulse
TL;DR a bookmarks folder in my browser to open a bunch of saved searches all at once. Continue reading