Advances in the availability and breadth of data over the past few decades have enabled the rapid and unregulated deployment of statistical algorithms that aim to predict and thereby influence the course of human behavior. Most are designed to promote the corporate bottom line, not the welfare of the people. Those that aim to promote the common good run the danger of straying into authoritarian suppression of freedoms. Regardless of intention, these algorithms often reinforce existing social inequities or present a double-edged sword, with potential for positive use weighed against potential for misuse.

Last month my manager asked me about changing our naming convention for the primary “source of truth” in source code management: from “master” to… well, anything but “master.” I admit to initial hesitancy. I needed to think about it. After all, it seems like the name derives from the multimedia concept of a “master copy.” It’s not like the terribly-named “master-slave” software and hardware patterns. Or is it?

This summer, one of the development teams at the Ed-Fi Alliance has been hard at work building Project Buzz: “When school shutdowns went into effect across the country as a result of COVID-19, much of the information teachers need to support students in the new online-school model had become fragmented across multiple surveys and the Student Information System.” (Fix-It-Fridays Delivers Project Buzz, A Mobile App to Help Teachers Prepare for Back-to-School).

As project architect, my role has been one of support for the development team, guiding technology toolkit choices and supporting downstream build and deployment operations. The team agreed to develop the applications in TypeScript on both the front- and back-ends. My next challenge: rapidly create TeamCity build configurations for all components using Kotlin code.

While the Ed-Fi Alliance has made investments to improve the installation processes for its tools, it is still a time–consuming task: easy to get wrong, you must have the right runtime libraries, and it is problematic to have multiple versions running on the same server.

Letter to the City Council of Austin, Texas, in appreciation for action taken this week in response to both the killings of George Floyd and others at the hands of police, and the heavy-handed tactics employed against peaceful protestors.

Should bugs and spikes receive story points to aid in sprint capacity planning? Some teams will estimate all work items by time during sprint planning in order to find the right commitment. Many teams hate this and/or spend an inordinate amount of time arguing about time. Those that abandon time may be tempted to put points on these unplanned, non-productive items, but there is a cost: the completed velocity will overstate the projected release timeline for the remainder of the release backlog.

Motivation

Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) is the principle of configuring systems through code instead of mouse clicks (cf Packer Tips and Lessons Learned for another example). TeamCity, the popular continuous-integration (CI) server from JetBrains, enables IaC through writing scripts to interact with its REST API, or by storing projects settings in version control. This article will share some lessons learned in using the Kotlin DSL for project settings. These will include:

Soon the Ed-Fi Alliance will release version 2.0 of our Analytics Middle Tier, welcoming it to the “big kids’ table” as a fully supported add-on to the ODS.

Spurred on by the goal of giving a brown bag tech talk on the subjects of test-driven development and SOLID object oriented design principles, I’ve finally collected all of the “wisdom” I’ve learned over the years into one place: Best Practices in Test-Driven, Object Oriented, Green- and Brownfield Development. I plan to keep this as a living document, adding or modifying as I continue to deepen my knowledge through feedback, study, and further experiments.