I have been frustrated with how project management tools make it hard for engineering teams to see the impact of their work on the product. I built Beacon (https://anvilyard.com/beacon), to fix this. Instead of focusing on moving a ticket to done, I am trying to get teams to think of how their tickets get the team closer to a product goal. I know there are a lot of cultural elements at play in an organization that affect how teams measure their progress, but I am trying to shape the tools we all use to make it easier to focus on end goals, not just features.
- Having it write Ansible tasks for me to automate setting up my infra.
- Generating test data for integration tests
- Create sample data for demos and marketing material.
More than often, reading the schema is the lowest hanging fruit when you are trying to understand the domain knowledge of a startup.
This becomes even more true when the codebase is not that readable. Now this is not an enough of a reason to shy away from NOSQL data stores, but should make you pause and consider what you will be losing when you invest in a schemaless DB.
Signal and the noise by Nate Silver(Very nice read. Chapters on climate change and GDP forecasting were a bit slow, but everything else was a page turner)
http://www.amazon.com/dp/159420411X