Fear Driven Development
summary
Argues that fear blocks change and shows concrete remedies: automated tests as exposure therapy, a Yammer-built database on Berkeley DB where failovers and a three-node recovery were exercised, a Redis kill -9 game day at Stripe that revealed snapshotting bugs, and a practical double dispatch backfill migration pattern. Covers measurable pains (queue depth spikes, 10k→10M user scale surprises), hack days, selective hiring to break fear, and when upgrades or deploy bundles actually caused outages. Watch if you want practical fixes, skip if you want only high-level theory.
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chapters (28)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:53I'm Ryan Kennedy
- 1:04Ada Initiative Advisor
- 5:28This is terrifying for a large engineering organization
- 5:57Fear is additive
- 6:18Fear compounds
- 6:43PUBLIC SPEAKING
- 6:54I'm afraid of databases
- 7:50What do developers fear?
- 9:30Performance
- 11:35Upgrades
- 12:20Deploying
- 13:57What's the downside of fear in software development?
- 14:17Fear induced loss of agility
- 16:21Fear erects barricades around the code and systems that need the most attention
- 17:33Ways of dealing with these fears
- 17:49Exposure therapy exposure to the feared object or context, without any danger, in order to overcome anxiety
- 18:45Reproducible, extensive testing as a safety harness
- 20:11Development and staging as safe zones
- 21:21Build confidence on non-critical systems
- 23:49Double dispatch when replacing existing functionality
- 25:16Hack Day!
- 29:38Organizational selective amnesia
- 31:53Are you a source of fear?
- 33:13Make time to test
- 33:58Make time for research
- 35:11Make time for maintenance
- 37:04OPEN SOURCE BRIDGE
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