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Hi! I'm Adam Gordon Bell

Choosing Engineering Excellence Over Expediency

Published 10 months ago • 1 min read

Adam Gordon Bell

March 4th

Leaving LinkedIn

Welcome to March and a new CoRecursive episode:

Can sustainable software development and tech giant fast-paced cultures truly coexist?

Imagine having to choose between your career at a tech giant and your deepest values. This is Chris Krycho's story, an engineer whose drive for sustainable coding clashed with some at LinkedIn.

What would you do in Chris's shoes? Let me know what you think.

Find it in your podcast player or on the website.

Move Fast And Break Things

The latest episode with Chris hits on an issue that anyone building software professionally for any length of time will have hit:

The desire to go fast can lead to a build-up of tech debt, and then things get slow.

You need investment over time to keep the speed up. Going slow by not making a mess, circling back to remove things that aren't needed, and a million other practices can make you faster on a longer timeline than actually just trying to go as fast as you can. But it takes work to do well for many reasons. One of which is that the speed of iteration is hard to quantify and that the boiling-frog effect can take place, where it just slowly gets worse in ways no one notices( or no one who can set priorities notices).

Another issue is that while adding a feature flag for a new feature has very quantifiable business value, going back and cleaning up old failed experiments and simplifying things is tough to put a business value on.

This latest episode is a great listen for all those reasons and more. Let me know what you think.

Let me know what you think.

Other Writing

Thanks,

Adam

​@adamgordonbell​

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