Fascination Steet #13

Writing for the week of April 28, 2025

I mentioned the article a few weeks ago that talked about the very first thing you should do is set up deployment and deploy a blank page. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about these foundational elements that we benefit from prioritizing and putting in place as soon as we can for production-ready applications.

Maybe the difference between protoype and production-ready may be these foundational pieces.

I’m thinking CI/CD. CI includes setting up the test suite and patterns. Patterns could be factories vs fixtures. Mocking. Browser integration. Finally the CI workflow. Maybe that means the Github Action.

I listened to a podcast the other day where a developer was walking through the use of Rust at Microsoft. The topic of bootstrapping came up. Rust projects could use some foundational pieces. Maybe it’s unit test and integration tests and they live in two places. Maybe it’s the decision to use Serde or not. Maybe some additional tooling around running the project locally like feature flags.

Maybe in a Rails app it is use of Tailwind or how schema migrations are applied.

The idea being that you set the foundation before ever writing a line of business logic. I think few teams do this. They immediately jump in an want something to show a stakeholder. If the project is an MVP fine. But accept that prototypes get thrown away. An MVP that skips the foundational stuff should never be deployed to production.

That article was great. Bravo to the author. It’s a subject I’ll spend a lot of time thinking about in the short term.

Quick side note on tooling, Linear - one of the biggest reasons I like Linear is the disciplines it subtly suggests. I’ve been on a lot of teams that suffer from really big PRs. In some cases, there is an inability to break things down. Other times, people lack discipline. Regardless, Linear has this amazing and simple feature where it gives you a branch name to use for a story. One branch name. One story. No addressing five stories in one PR if you stick to one PR per branch. Linear is just so good at the little details.

▧ ▧ ▧

Links

• https://medium.com/@katyagorshkova/understanding-kafka-kraft-how-controllers-and-brokers-talk-in-the-zookeeper-less-world-a5e05a063f34 - Kafka was my domain at Nike and I’ve used it in a number of systems. Removing Zookeeper has been a long time coming.
• https://thenewstack.io/the-interrupt-tax-why-developer-productivity-is-measured-in-silences/ - this would be a crazy thing to measure. Reinforces the interruption period on knowledge workers is greater than the time they are interrupted.

▧ ▧ ▧

Music

• https://cheapperfume.bandcamp.com/track/its-okay-to-punch-nazis-2 - summer anthem

▧ ▧ ▧

A couple of promotions each week. First, use my invite link to try Warp as your terminal. It’s fast and has some great features. I’m not affiliated with them at all, just really like it. Also, check out my project–Schemabook, especially if you work in an organization that wants to get organized around defining data through contracts and collaboration. Lastly, I’m writing a book about learning Rust if you are familiar with Ruby. Stay tuned. As always, you can connect with me more at https://mikekrisher.com.