(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 … Read moreTaking care of code … more and more code
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 … Read moreFun with Docker: “Release file… is not valid yet”
If the highways are crowded, and they build more lanes, the highways get more crowded. If development is slow, and you add resources, development gets slower. Adding people to a project increases the capacity for activity. Activity doesn’t translate to outcomes. In these cases, you’re adding capacity to the system for cars, or for work, … Read moreIncrease capacity, move slower
In business, we want to focus on our core domain, and let everything else be “good enough.” We need accounting, payroll, travel. But we don’t need those to be special if our core business is software for hospitals. As developers, we want to focus on changing our software, because that is our core work. We … Read moreStick with “good enough,” until it isn’t
We build our software in a particular world, a world of technologies that we link together. We choose a programming system (language, runtime, framework), libraries, and environment. We integrate components: databases, logging, and many different services. Perhaps we built it on Java 8 running on VMs in our datacenter, connecting to a proprietary queuing service … Read moreRebase on the World
Here’s a lovely graphic from the folks at Intercom. It describes the difference between what companies sell and what people buy. We don’t want the tool, we want what we can do with the tool. Take it further – maybe what that skateboarder really wants is: the high fives at the end. Our accomplishments feel … Read moreTools -> capabilities -> acclaim
(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 … Read morePrinciples of Collaborative Automation
A quick definition, without the narrative Symmathecist: (sim-MATH-uh-sist) an active participant in a symmathesy. A symmathesy (sim-MATH-uh-see, coined by Nora Bateson) is a learning system made of learning parts. Software teams are each a symmathesy, composed of the people on the team, the running software, and all their tools. The people on the team learn … Read moreSymmathecist (n)
Software Development has moved forward a lot recently. Both on the code side and the runtime side, we’ve had huge advances. we’ve seen more advances in writing code and in running it, than in the bridge from written to running We have way better languages and frameworks for writing applications now. For instance, JavaScript, JQuery, and … Read moreAdvancing the bridge
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 … Read moreAlign the stars (programmatically)