Learning is a struggle against “the illusions of commonsense perception” (Maria Popova). When it was obvious that the Earth stood still and the Moon moved, Kepler wrote a novel about traveling to the moon and meeting a civilization who believed, based on their commonsense perception, that the Moon stood still and the Earth moved. If …
TL;DR – we can get a complete, consistent model of a small piece of the world using Event Sourcing. This is powerful but expensive. Today on twitter, Jimmy Bogard on the tradeoffs of Event Sourcing: If event sourcing is not scalable, faster, or simpler, why use it? Event Sourcing gives you a complete, consistent model …
Step 1: On one team, put the people with the knowledge and control necessary to change the software, see the results, change it, see the results. Step 2: Use automation to take extrinsic cognitive load off this team, so that it needs fewer people. That’s it, that’s DevOps. Step 1 describes the cultural change that …
(This is a shorter version of my talk for DeliveryConf, January 2020. Video of slides+audio; Slides as pdf) Good software is still alive. The other day, I asked my twelve year old daughter for recommendations of drawing programs. She told me about one (FireAlpaca?) “It’s free, and it updates pretty often.” She contrasted that with …
Today my Docker build failed on Windows because apt-get update failed because some release files were not valid yet. It said they’d be valid in about 3.5 hours. WAT. I don’t care about your release files! Do not exit with code 100! This is not what I want to think about right now! Spoiler: restarting …
“Which database is the best?” Superlatives are dangerous. They pressure you to line up the alternatives in a row, judge them all, make the perfect decision. This implies that databases can be compared based on internal qualities. Performance, reliability, scalability, integrity, what else is there? We know better than that. We recognize that relational databases, …
Today my daughter overslept and I had to take her to school. Usually when that happens, I get all grouchy and resentful. Dammit, I thought I’d get a nice quiet coffee but NO, I’m scraping ice off the car. Today I didn’t mind. It was fine. It’s the first day back after winter break, so …
It’s difficult for an executive to criticize a budget when most line items are for mysterious high technology activities. It’s easier to tackle the more understandable portions, like postage, janitorial services, and consulting. Jerry Weinberg We want to help. We want to do stuff. We look for matches between what needs done and what we …
Today I brought up a load of laundry. When doing chores, I practice keeping WIP (work in progress) to a minimum. Finish each thing, then do another one. This is good training for code. For instance, on the way up the stairs with the basket, I saw a tumbleweed of cat hair. I didn’t pick …
Games aren’t much “fun” when rules, rather than relationships, dominate the activity, when there is no attention to “flow,” “fairness,” “respect” and “nice.” Dr. Linda Hughes, “Beyond the Rules of the Game: Why Are Rooie Rules Nice?” At a past job, we played Hearts every day at lunch. Out of a core group of 6-8, …