Every conference has little themes for me. Here’s one from Philly ETE this week.
The opening keynote from Tom Igoe, founder of Arduino, displayed examples of unique and original projects. Many of them were built for one person – a device to tell her mother whether she’s taken this pill already today, or to help his father play guitar again after a stroke. Others were created for one place: this staircase becomes a piano. Arduino enables design in the small: design completely customized for a context and an audience. A product that meets these local needs, that works; no other requirements.
Diana Larsen does something similar for agile retrospectives. She pointed out that repeating the same retrospective format shows diminishing returns. Before a 90-minute retro, Diana spends 1-3 hours preparing: gathering data, choosing a theme and an activity. She has high-scale models of how people learn, yet each learning opportunity is custom-designed for the context and people. This has great returns: when a team gains the skill of thoughtful retrospectives, all team meetings are transformed.
Individualization appeared in smaller ways on the second day: Erik mentioned the compiler flags available in the Typelevel Scala compiler, allowing people to choose their language features. Aaron Bedra customized security features to the attack at hand: a good defense is intentional, as thoughtfully built as product features. Every one different.
Finally, Rebecca Wirfs-Brock debunked the agile aversion to architecture. Architecture tasks can be scaled and timeboxed based on the size and cruciality of the project. Architecture deliverables meet current needs, work for the team, and nothing else. It’s almost like designing each design process to suit the context.
This is the magic that agile development affords us: suiting each process, each technology, each step to the local context. That helps us do our best work. The tricky bit is keeping that context in mind at all levels. From my talk: the best developers are reasoning at all scales, from the code details of this function to the program to the software system to the business of why are we doing this at all. This helps us do the right work. Maintaining the connection from what we’re doing to why we’re doing it, we can make better decisions. And as Tom said in the closing sentence of the opening keynote, we can remember: “The things we make are less important than the relationships they enable.”
This was one of the themes I took from PhillyETE. Other takeaways were tweeted. There were many great talks, and InfoQ filmed them, so I’ll link them in this post later. This is conference is thoughtfully put together. Recommend.