(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
When you learn to code, you acquire a superpower: automation. We turn the computer into a machine to do our (very specific) bidding. We get paid to automate what other people want. We can and should use this superpower for ourselves too! Levels of automation Are we programmers or software developers? Probably both. I think …
I want to start recording the benefits I get out of personal and local (team-level) automation. When I have a local version of a maven library installed, say 0.19.0-SNAPSHOT, but I want to go back to using the last released version, say 0.18.0, then I need to delete the library from my local maven repo. …
Read morepersonal automation example: deleting a local maven artifact
(This post continues from the Royal Yak, and concludes the series A Taxonomy of Yaks.) When we improve how we work, we make tasks faster. We make progress smoother. This is magnified when we improve how all our team members work, or our whole community. Now and then, though, an improvement turns into something more: …
(continued from Imperial Yaks; part of A Taxonomy of Yak Shaving series) Trim Yaks, aka, the Hackhacking yak (making coding faster) Each of the previous yaks stood in the way of a particular task. The Trim Yak is not so task-specific; these are the ones that let us work faster generally. I nickname them “Hackhacking Yaks” …
Yak Shaving is: doing seemingly-unrelated tasks to get some real task done. The name has obscure roots and doesn’t matter; the key is that it makes you think, “Why would you do that?” Yak shaving can be: I want to make dinner, but I’m doing stairs; moving objects around in order to clear a path …