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Technical

Managing Change / Change Management

This is a big topic! We can discuss change at the corporate/organizational level, or we can zoom in on controlling change in software development. I’ll leave it open for the group to steer the conversation. Controversial opinions welcome.

Anyone have horror stories? Boss drops a 500-page manual on your desk Friday afternoon and says “figure this new tool out by Monday”? You show up one morning and the entire phone system/email client/ERP has been replaced overnight with zero warning?

What about managing requirements? You work for weeks on a feature and it's suddenly dropped? Or a new requirement causes a major rewrite? Or maybe the real issue about managing expectations.

Regarding version-control, we can also dig into trunk-based vs feature-branch workflows vs Git Flow, and when each actually makes sense.

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Zoom link will be posted at 12pm MDT.

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Don’t Pre‑optimize: Why Clarity Beats Premature Performance Tweaks

Every developer has stared at a fresh function and wondered, “Can I make this faster right now?” Simon Harris’s Beginner Algorithms (2006) reminds us that pre‑optimizing is often a wild goose chase. In this week’s Weekly Dev Chat we’ll unpack that advice, examine real‑world trade‑offs, and surface strategies for balancing performance with readability. Main arguments:

  • Most hot‑spots are hidden in I/O, network latency, or third‑party services, not in the loops we think matter.

  • Well‑structured code is easier to profile, test, and refactor. Simple abstractions often let compilers and runtimes optimise better than hand‑rolled tricks.

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Zoom link will be posted at 12pm MDT.

scientist in laboratory

Testing

What is the state of testing at your workplace? Is it continuous? Do you have a dedicated QA team? What tools are you using to support testing? Has Test-Driven Development (TDD) made a significant impact in the industry? Are you conducting security-focused testing?

Last week, AWS experienced an outage—arguably unanticipated due to insufficient testing. Do you test for infrastructure failures?

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Zoom link will be posted at 12pm MDT.

testing