Every week, I come across a handful of things that make me pause and think, "More dev teams should know this." Sometimes it's a tiny process tweak. Sometimes it's an underused AWS option. Sometimes it's just a smarter default you didn't realize was already helping you out.
In this edition, I'm sharing four such picks: an agile habit that actually works, an easy AWS cost saver, a way to spot trustworthy open source tools, and a MySQL tip that might save you hours of tuning. No fluff - just things you can put to use right away.
Developers hate meetings - fair. But if I had to pick just one ritual and one metric to boost delivery, it'd be:
WIP = Total open work items / # of developers
Teams that keep WIP under control ship faster and break less.
If you're just getting started with AWS—or looking to cut cloud costs—my first recommendation is simple: go Graviton
They're up to 40% cheaper than x86 EC2, with better performance per dollar. One of the reason they are cheaper is because the graviton processor is designed by Amazon and of course they want to promote it. A handy tool for directly comparing Graviton instances with other EC2 types is available here.
For most workloads, it's a no-brainer, just make sure your stack is ARM-compatible, and you're set to save. You can read more about Graviton here.
The gap between the best software engineering practice and the average practice is very wide - perhaps wider than in any other engineering discipline. A tool that disseminates good practice would be important. - Fred Brooks
The Open Source Security Index is designed to make it easier to discover high-quality open source security projects. It ranks projects on GitHub using an "Index Score" - a weighted average of key metrics retrieved monthly from GitHub and normalized on a 0–100 scale. You can read more about it here.
If you're running MySQL on a dedicated server, you might not need to obsess over config tuning anymore. MySQL has long supported automatic configuration adjustments based on detected system resources. It dynamically sets values like innodb_buffer_pool_size, max_connections, and table_open_cache based on available RAM and CPU. You can read more about it here.