Holly Cummins
banner
hollycummins.com
Holly Cummins
@hollycummins.com
@RedHat - Senior Principal Software Engineer, working on Quarkus. Ex-IBM. Java Champion, developer, author, #cloud surfer and maker. My views are my own.
Reposted by Holly Cummins
This is something I have tried to teach management at every job I've had when I wrote code; I sympathize with the need for metrics but this is a hard problem to solve

Now that I'm in management myself I am working hard to find meaningful metrics for my team and the value they deliver.
Trying to measure coding productivity is, and always will be, a fool's errand.

Why? Because I can go for a walk then take a shower and have an idea, then write a single line of code that fixes everything I was working on.

Immense productivity, but by most metrics I didn't do anything at all.
November 16, 2025 at 6:36 PM
Reposted by Holly Cummins
Are your metrics KILLING your team?

@hollycummins.com & @trishagee.bsky.social bust the biggest myths of #DeveloperProductivity: lines of code & "busy-ness" destroy business value.

Learn how Developer Joy & Strategic Boredom can unlock 31% higher efficiency and throughput: bit.ly/3Xyl0kA

#InfoQ
November 17, 2025 at 8:38 AM
I have a technique I call incompetence-based-mutation-testing.

Start making some changes. Bork everything, comment out half the existing code to just make stuff compile. Run tests. Watch tests pass.

Stop refactoring, go have a stern word with the tests.
November 14, 2025 at 11:54 AM
Reposted by Holly Cummins
Includes "Minecraft as an Observability Client"

#JustSaying
Check out the new extensions added to the extensions catalog in October!

quarkus.io/extensions/n...

#ExtendQuarkus
November 4, 2025 at 3:41 PM
One last piece of seasonal tech content: hollycummins.com/vampires-and...

Why vampires and zombies are skulking in your codebase.
Zombie Menace, Vampire Peril - Holly Cummins
It’s the spookiest time of year! You might think spookiness and tech are unrelated, but you’d be wrong. Well, actually, you’d probably be…
hollycummins.com
October 31, 2025 at 1:26 PM
I don't know how to explain this coincidence if my computer doesn't have (a) self-awareness and (b) a malevolent sense of humour.
October 27, 2025 at 4:41 PM
Change of plans - Quarkus is one hour *earlier* for the EU folks. :)
Reminder for the US folks, Quarkus Insights will be live one hour later this week than usual due to the difference between EU and US daylight savings.
October 27, 2025 at 1:08 PM
Reposted by Holly Cummins
This reminds me about a walking route from Germany to NYC, USA I tried for fun some years ago. But back then Google listed „swim xxxx kilometers through the Atlantic ocean“ which surprised me in a positive way (that it recognized swimming).
October 21, 2025 at 2:28 PM
Reposted by Holly Cummins
Great talk by @hollycummins.com at Lindholmen developer day. As a data person and as someone who used to work with healthcare this resonated a lot: "don't make human tell computer things the computer already knows". It is so key but so often neglected in practice (&definitely a thief of joy) #databs
October 22, 2025 at 8:05 AM
This looks more like a swimming route than a walking route, Google.
October 21, 2025 at 12:16 PM
... and apparently our streaming provider uses AWS. :)

So no Quarkus Insights today. Sorry, everyone!
⏰ Starting soon! Join us for Quarkus Insights Ep. #223 as Ben Evans @kittylyst@mastodon.social discusses the evolution of managed execution in the JVM, its shifting role in the cloud, and innovations like build-time optimization and constrained dynamism.

bit.ly/quarkusinsig...

#quarkusinsights
October 20, 2025 at 1:07 PM
Reposted by Holly Cummins
Big hugs to everyone whose status page origin server is hosted on AWS and just pushes updates to a CDN cache.
October 20, 2025 at 1:00 PM
As it's Friday, and coming up to halloween, please enjoy my favourite-ever slide deck: hollycummins.com/blood-curdli...

The PDF doesn't capture how I animated the bat wings to flap on the containers, or how I used a greenscreen and and bat cutouts to make it look like bats were hovering over me.
Blood-curdling tales of microservices misadventure, devops dread, and grisly governance - Holly Cummins
Cloud native – the perfect recipe for innovation, adaptability, and engineering excellence. Right? Well, when it goes right. When it goes…
hollycummins.com
October 17, 2025 at 12:14 PM
I don't often donate to Wikipedia, but @molly.wiki's coverage of the current attacks on it has prompted me to pause-and-plunk-up.
October 16, 2025 at 1:36 PM
It's 2025, and sharing a large file in a work context is still a significant headache. Shouldn't we have ... done better than this?
October 16, 2025 at 9:33 AM
Darn. I should have worn my "assume all women are technical and can breathe fire" t-shirt.
October 9, 2025 at 10:25 PM
I didn't have a chance to show this (generated in 13ms with a quarkus + picocli) in my #Devoxx talk:
October 9, 2025 at 4:11 PM
Fascinating pointer from @kevlin.bsky.social and James Lewis: cepr.org/voxeu/column...
"[Professions using AI] worked roughly 3.15 hours more per week in the post-ChatGPT period. When AI complements human labour rather than replacing it, the process makes each hour of work more valuable."

#GOTOConf
As AI’s power grows, so does our workday
Technological progress is typically expected to lighten the burden of work. But as artificial intelligence has been integrated into workplaces, early evidence suggests a paradox: instead of reducing workloads, many AI-equipped employees are busier than ever. This column examines the relationship between AI exposure, the length of the workday, time allocation, and worker satisfaction. Though AI-driven automation and delegation allow workers to complete the same tasks more efficiently, the authors find that employees in AI-exposed occupations are working longer hours and spending less time on socialisation and leisure.
cepr.org
October 2, 2025 at 3:41 PM
I just tried to reproduce @janelleshane.com's brilliant "make an LLM apologise for suggesting a giraffe as CEO" experiment. It 100% worked on Ollama.

Which is bad, because when I read it I did an involuntary shriek of laughter, and woke a sleeping puppy, and now I won't be able to do more work.
October 1, 2025 at 10:34 AM
InfoQ have published "The Efficiency Paradox," complete with transcript.
Apparently I said things like:
- "Am I optimizing for the right thing, or should I maybe be just a little bit more jellyfish?"
- "If you do the same experiment to your stool, it's much less cruel"
www.infoq.com/presentation...
The Efficiency Paradox and How to Save Yourself and the World
Holly Cummins discusses how to eliminate waste in software development. She shares strategies like "LightSwitchOps" and build-time initialization to improve machine efficiency. She explains how these ...
www.infoq.com
September 29, 2025 at 8:53 AM
Expected: is "Hello from Quarkus REST"
Actual: , Skibidi., Skibidi., Skibidi., Skibidi., Skibidi., Skibidi., Skibidi., Skibidi., Skibidi., Skibidi., Skibidi., Skibidi., Skibidi., Skibidi., Skibidi., [many more Skibidis]., Skibidi., Skibidi., Skibidi., Skibidi., Skibidi.. This demo is dog water.
😳
September 27, 2025 at 11:06 AM
There's no sense crying over spilled milk, but spilled coffee?

That's *definitely* worth crying over.
September 26, 2025 at 10:52 AM