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 …
Software development is a neverending string of “What happens if I…?” Each new runtime, language, or tool is a new world with its own laws of nature. We get to explore each one with experiments. Objective Today I added another alias to my PowerShell $profile: To use that alias in my current shell, I need …
The other day we had problems with a service dying. It ran out of memory, crashing and failing to respond to all open requests. That service was running analyses of repositories, digging through their files to report on the condition of the code. It ran out of memory trying to analyze a particular large repository …
(this is a transcription of the talk by the same name. Here is a video.) Collaboration is crucial in software teams – and not only among people. We need our software, our tools, and our automations to collaborate as well. But what does that mean? I have four prerequisites for you here, and then four precautions …
Yesterday I was ready to get some changes into master, so I merged in the latest and opened a PR. But NO, the build on my pull request broke.The error was: ERROR: (jsdoc-format) /long/path/to/file.ts[52, 1]: asterisks in jsdoc must be alignedERROR: (jsdoc-format) /long/path/to/file.ts[53, 1]: asterisks in jsdoc must be alignedERROR: (jsdoc-format) /long/path/to/file.ts[54, 1]: asterisks in …
(originally published in the SD Times) How do we influence the operation of a complex dynamical system like a team? How do we get a development team to function closer to our preferences, and still let people operate as self-actualized humans? In Dynamics in Action, Alicia Juarrero describes complex systems such as people in terms …
Or: the Origins of Opera and the Future of Programming. (video, or TL;DR, or abstract) At the end of this post is an audacious idea about the present and future of software development. In the middle are points about mental models: how important and how difficult they are. But first, a story of the origins …
Read moreCollective problem solving in music, art, science, and software
Does caring scale? We can’t all care about everything. We have cities without clean water, a criminal justice system full of injustice, and oceans clogged with paper bags. There are too many important causes to catalogue, much less champion. We can only contribute to a few. We can’t all care about everything. At my house, …
automation changes the rules we play by Fast v Safe Tradeoffs are a fact of life. Choose between safety and speed, stability and flexibility. More of one sacrifices the other. fast or safe, we are somewhere on that spectrum I remember a time when this described our decisions about software deployments. Deployments caused problems, so we did fewer …
Collaboration is hard. There are the essential difficulties of dealing with people, and then there are incidental challenges in the tools we use. Communicating with people, while clicking into to Travis to see the build status and asking: where is this deployed? Who tested it? I want to remove all those incidental challenges, even the …
Read moreShaping our Tools to the Flow of Conversation: Issue Creation