The Engineering Ecosystem

Summary of Highligths and Index for all Articles

👋 Hey, I am Klaus Haeuptle! Welcome to this month’s edition of the Engineering Ecosystem newsletter in which I write about a variety of software engineering and architecture topics like clean code, test automation, decision-making, technical debt, large scale refactoring, culture, sustainability, cost and performance, generative AI and more.

In this edition of the newsletter I am summarizing the highlights of writing the newsletter, other blogs and books so far. The idea for this edition is inspired by newsletter editions from other writers on substack like Lenny Rachitsky or Ryan Peterman.

Besides, I am sharing an index to make it easier access all the content. If you find the newsletter helpful, please share it with your friends and coworkers. I’ve reviewed and organized every single post from the past year into different categories.

Statistics: Insights from Writing and Publishing

Some of the highlights this year:

• The newsletter has now more than 850 subscribers and is continuously growing.

• The most read blog I have published is Clean Code: Writing maintainable, readable and testable code with more than 170k views. The most resonating post on social media was an announcement for ABAP cleaner with more than 100k views.

• Most of the readers come from Germany, the United States and India. We are thrilled to note that our newsletter has reached an impressive 59 countries worldwide. Would be great to reach more countries at the end of next year. Appreciate your support in achieving this goal 🙏

Screenshot from this publication’s Substack dashboard

It's also truly rewarding to learn about the influence our published books have had on the professional journeys of software engineers in the industry. Thanks for sharing your experience - Julian Philipps, Michael Keller and to everyone who shared an Amazon review.

Index of all newsletter editions of the Engineering Ecosystem

Here’s a list of all the articles grouped by the main category the article belongs to.

Decision-Making

• Effective Decision-Making Strategies for Open Source Risk Management and Sustainability

• Effective Decision-Making: The Importance of Alignment and Autonomy in Software Development

• Why Pull Requests can be a great tool for involving colleagues into the Decision-Making Process: Effective Architecture Decisions

• Effective Architecture Decisions: From Request for Comments (RFC) to Documenting Architecture Decisions (ADR)

Test Automation

• How to Conduct a Team Retrospective to move towards an Effective, Maintainable and Robust Test Suite

• How to improve Testability

• Alternatives to Postman for Exploratory and Automated API Testing)

• Shared Language for talking about Test Strategy with a focus on the Test Pyramid

Clean Code

• Code Review, Business Impact of Code Quality, State of DevOps 2022, Clean ABAP Change Proposals

• Evolving the OpenSource contribution and governance model: Involving software engineers in shaping the future of Clean ABAP and the Style Guide repository

• Clean Code Community - From Contribution to Decision

• Pair Programming, Code Review, The Great Migration to Mastodon, Clean SAPUI5

• Respectful Code Review, Code Retreat, DevOps and more

• Clean ABAP: Writing maintainable and testable code

• Clean SAPUI5 Recording available

Architecture

• Domain-Driven Design Curated Resources

Technical Debt

• A Shared Language to talk about Technical Debt

Large Scale Refactoring

• Large Scale Refactoring: Refactoring Across Many Projects

• Security: Fixing Vulnerabilities: Keeping Open Source Dependencies Up To Date

Culture

• Stop Blaming, Take a Holistic Perspective, and Start Improving

• Onboarding of New Software Engineers and Software Engineers Changing Roles or Stacks

• Harnessing the Power of Collective Code Ownership for Team Growth, Higher Productivity and Reducing Risks

• Get Higher Quality and Productivity by tackling the Broken Window Effect

• Documentation as Code: Improve the quality of documentation, decisions, communication and meetings

• Collaboration on Improving: Why I'm launching the Engineering Ecosystem

• Continuous Learning in Cross-Functional Teams: Multipliers and Community of Practice

• Why agile transformations can fail to deliver the promised outcome

Sustainability, Cost and Performance

• Are we getting Cloud Deployments wrong and are Unikernels the Solution?: Improving Sustainability, Cost and Performance

Generative AI

• How to Secure Your Large Language Model Applications - at least partially

• Impact of Generative AI on Software Engineering, Emerging Technology Stack, Free Course Offerings

• AI Assistance for TDD, Controlling Large Language Models, Disruption of Creative Work, Clean Code

• AI tools to enhance creativity, LangChain, Semantic Kernel, Agile Antipatterns

• How to learn Prompt Engineering to get better results from ChatGPT, Bing and Dall E

Curated Newsletters

• Insights from the State of DevOps Report 2023

• Thought Works Technology Radar 2023, Insomnia

• How Generative AI Could Disrupt Creative Work, Java is not dead, Choosing the best decision making approach, Integrating your data with…

• Enablers for Decision-Making, Prompt Engineering, Cheap LLM Training, Even Driven Architectures, How generative AI is changing the way…

• React Dev, ChatGPT API, WASM and Technical Debt in Merger & Aquisitions

• Evolution of Rust, Improving your writing with ChatGPT, Emergent Capabilities of LLMs

• Use cases for AI tools, Code Generation, GitHub Code Search, Clean Code Collaboration

• GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, GIT Visualization, Developer Productivity

• Evolution of Machine Learning, ChatGPT supporting Refactoring, Value of Employee Tenure and Asnychronous Workloads

• Maintaining Open Source, OpenID Connect, Asynchronous Programming in JavaScript, Clean ABAP

• State of JavaScript, Developer Well-being and Hybrid Work, Open Source report, Java to Kotlin

• Clean Code, Reducing Logging Cost, Aspirational Architecture, Mono Repository Tools

• Pair Programming, Code Review, The Great Migration to Mastodon, Clean SAPUI5

• Respectful Code Review, Code Retreat, DevOps and more

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Thanks so much for a great year and being part of the journey. I hope the content has been helpful for you. To help me pick future topics , please add a comment.

If you’re finding this newsletter valuable, share it with a friend and co-workers.

Also, if you have feedback about how I can make the newsletter better, let me know via your preferred channel on LinkedIn, Mastodon or by leaving a comment in the newsletter edition🙏