Here are March’s links a day early… ###A guide to the care and feeding of new devs

Excited, overwhelmed, frustrated and fear were the top four emotions felt by junior developers.

###Simpsum

Simple text placeholders for your website

###Setting Up a Raspberry Pi without a Monitor or Keyboard

There are a lot of how-to’s online describing ways to set up a Raspberry Pi without a monitor or keyboard, but none of them are simple or straightforward. This will be. I’m going to walk through how to do this on a Mac, but something like this should also work on Windows using internet connection sharing and the Event Viewer.

###The Ultimate List of 100 Software Testing Quotes

###dlevsha/compalex

Lightweight script to compare two database

This was helpful finding the difference between two databases.

###Ditching Scrum for Kanban — The best decision we’ve made as a team

After a dozen or so sprints under our belt, we started to notice some things. The first is that it is extremely hard to accurately plan 2 weeks of work. The vast majority of the time, we’d overestimate the amount of work we could do. Granted, we did get more disciplined about estimating and we eventually fell into a cadence. But still, we were off every time.

I find it really difficult to do this as well and I wonder if others have this problem…

###GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart — and we have the full inside story

Cofounder CEO Chris Wanstrath, with support from the board, is radically changing the company’s culture: Out with flat org structure based purely on meritocracy, in with supervisors and middle managers. This has ticked off many people in the old guard.

I read GitHub was using a flat org structure a couple years ago and I think even with small companies it’s hard to have a flat org structure. I always wondered how well it would work when the company got big enough for that to be a problem.

###Web Performance of the World’s Top 50 Blogs

Let’s start with the size of each site’s homepage. The average page size of the top 50 blogs was 4.82 MB. This is an increase from the average 2.10 MB homepage size we found when we studied the top 100 blogs in 2012. It’s also a big jump from the 934 kB in average size we found in 2008.

Sigh…

I’m amazed tmz.com was 20 MB! Who’s looking at that page?

###dlevsha/compalex

Lightweight script to compare two database

###8 Ways to Become a Better Coder

That’s an easy career improvement goal to give oneself, but “become a kick-ass programmer” is not a simple goal. For one thing, saying, “I want to get better” assumes that you recognize what “better” looks like. Plus, too many people aim for improvement without any sense of how to get there.

###Eating spaghetti with Symfony

Big-bang migrations hardly ever work and usually take significantly more effort than expected. It’s also hard to convince the stakeholders there’s any value in the whole operation. It’s much more effective to make gradual improvements. It’s also more rewarding to celebrate success after every sprint. Learn how to leverage Symfony to move away from an Old School PHP Spaghetti Project™ to a modern Symfony based application. Release after the first iteration and keep improving the code base, delivering value in the same time.

###Podcast: Reply All - In The Desert

Strangers keep coming to Mike and Christina’s house looking for their stolen cell phones. Nobody knows why. We travel to Atlanta to find out what’s going on, in our thorniest Super Tech Support yet.

Reply All has been consistently a good listen and I really don’t think I’ve EVERY heard an episode I regretted sitting through. This one’s interesting because it really shows how new technology can wreck havok on people’s lives in unanticipated ways.

###Podcast: Three Devs and a Maybe - Designing APIs with Camille Baldock

An interesting conversation about APIs and the crazy options.

###Podcast: Floss Weekly 373 - Apache Libcloud I found this article interesting for two reasons.

  1. They discussed why it’s important to have a library that’s cross cloud provider so you could switch easily if necessary.
  2. The guest discusses a bad experience he had maintaining an open source project that was abandoned.

###Podcast: Ctrl+Click Cast - Practical Pricing with Brad Weaver An excellent discussing on how to price yourself. His book sounds interesting and I’ve added it to my wish list.

###Podcast: Ctrl+Click Cast - Overwhelmed by Code with Susan Robertson They discuss how you can be overwhelmed by all the new technogies that are brought up and we feel like we should be learning them at nights and weekends.