Process

On July 19, Twilio was the victim of a hacking attack that made headlines. An attacker uploaded malicious code to an SDK that Twilio maintains. The injected exploit made a victim’s browser load code that was possibly intended to steal information from them as they shopped online.

In Shape Up, we work in 6-week cycles to solve business problems. This constraint is meant to put pressure on the pitch writing process. With only 6 weeks, we must ensure that we are not biting off more than we can chew, or rather that we know we can chew (and swallow) everything we’ve bitten.

In an ideal world, everyone would build applications with a software development lifecycle (SDLC) that considers security at every step. The security and regulatory space of the application would be understood.

We have a lot of posts about Test Driven Development (TDD) on this blog. We’re big proponents of TDD and the discipline added by its red, green, refactor workflow. First we define a problem with a failing (red) test, then we create the supporting functionality (green), then we iterate on the product (refactor) and prepare ourselves for the next problem we’ll be solving.

This is the third post in a series of our takes on bike shedding. After understanding the origin story and how we might lose our empathy in our crusade against bike shedding can we still glean anything valuable from the infamous bike shed?

This is the second of a series of blog posts about bike sheds. In part one, we explored the history of the bike shed story, you can read part one here.

If you’re working in software, there’s good odds that you’ve run into the phrase “bike shedding” at least once. Maybe you were in a meeting or a group chat and sensed the discussion had wandered a bit.

I struggle with the concept of chores. Every time I sweep my floor, I can’t help but think that I’ll just need to sweep it again next week, and the week after that.

Your credit card debt is out. of. control. What do you do? Budget paydown! In software development, we try to apply that same idea of budgeting paydown to technical debt in our applications.

We’ve all seen this story. You’ve worked hard on some cool new stuff and are ready to push, but the universe has other ideas. BBZZZT! Conflict! What do you do?