What makes software hard to change? As a developer, it’s easy to focus on the internal properties of the software system. The code needs refactored, the framework is old, we need more tests, or else fewer tests. If your software is in production, these are not the biggest obstacle to change. The important changes are …
Soft skills are hard. “They take work to build and work to apply.” @ruthmalan The word “hard” describes sciences like physics and chemistry. It is confusing that “hard” can mean difficult, because these sciences aren’t more difficult than the “soft” ones like sociology and anthropology. They’re differently difficult. The “hard” sciences are hard because they’re …
The magic of a gelled team is that they know how to work together, and together, they know how to do particular work. The members don’t know how to work together; the team does. These learnings don’t reside in the members individually, the learnings are in the interrelations. A shared know-how is jointly constructed between …
Art has progressed from “inner coherence” to contextual, interrelated meaning. Can software get there too?
It is better to practice risky things often and in small chunks with a limited blast radius, rather than to avoid risky things. Charity Majors, “Test in production? Yes“ Charity is writing about deploys. Not-deploying may be safer for tonight, but in the medium term it leads to larger deploys and bigger, trickier failures. In …
In hard sciences, we aim to describe causality from the bottom up, from elementary particles. Atoms form molecules, molecules form objects, and the reason objects bounce off each other is reduced to electromagnetic interactions between the molecules in their surfaces. Molecules in DNA determine production of proteins which result in cell operations which construct organisms. …
In Dynamics in Action, Alicia Juarrero describes human action as a selection, a sample, from probability space. Everything we could do, and the likelihood of each, is a function of our situation, our habits, and our intentions. From this we select some action in each moment. Karl Popper calls these possible actions propensities, and he …
It takes more than one skill to be useful these days. Development, communication, writing, interviewing, management, business — these skills don’t do anything by themselves. Developing what? communicating what? Which business? You need a domain of expertise to apply these abstract skills to. I can’t communicate what I don’t understand. Nor develop good software in …
The other day there was a tweet about a Chief Happiness Officer. Later someone remarked about their Agile Transformation Office. It seems like we (as a culture) think that we can add qualities to systems the way we add ingredients to a recipe. Systems, especially symmathesies, aren’t additive! Agility, happiness, these are spread throughout the …
I begin to wonder whether I am mad or have hit on an idea which is much bigger than I am. Gregory Bateson As someone who grew up in a religion and then let go of it in my mid-twenties, it’s easy to say, religion is a useless fiction that persists because a powerful group …