Some people work in a system, and some people work on a system. Like, you can be the person who washes the dishes, or the person who installs and maintains the dishwasher. You can be the person who assembles the reports every week, or the person who automates that report assembly. (Jacob Stoebel told this …
The other day, I heard a story about a leadership retreat where the goal was to agree upon shared values. They held a vote, and lo, there was an even split between all the values. The group could not agree on which ones represented the company. This makes sense. Our values are part of our …
I’ve long preferred to work on teams that base cooperation on shared values like inclusiveness, respect, and curiosity. Teams where everyone feels valued at all times, both as a coworker and as a human. Yet, the phrase “shared values” kinda gives me the willies. It implies that our compatibility as teammates comes from deep-seated beliefs. …
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 …
or, a week in the life of a programmer Lately I’m working on our documentation. We write it in markdown, turn it into a web site, and then serve it from s3. To turn it into a web site, we use mkdocs and the material theme for mkdocs. Mkdocs is written in Python. Then we …
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 …
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 …
The inaugural REdeployConf wrapped up yesterday (as I write this). I’m already feeling withdrawal from intense learning and conversations. I’ll attempt to summarize them in this post. The RE in REdeploy doesn’t mean “again” (lo, it is the first of its kind). RE stands for Resilience Engineering. It is a newish field, focused on sociotechnical …
In Why Information Grows (my review), physicist César Hidalgo explains that the difference between the ability to produce tee shirts vs rockets is a matter of accumulating knowledge and know-how inside people, and weaving those people into networks. Because no one person can know how to build a rocket from rocks. No one person understands …
The other day in Iceland, a tiny conference on the Future of Software Development opened with Michael Feathers addressing a recurring theme: complexity. Software development is drowning in accidental complexity. How do we fight it? he asks. Can we embrace it? I ask. Complexity: Fight it, or fight through it, or embrace it? Yes. Here, …