The most productive developer on a team is usually the one with the most knowledge of the system. Of the code, the business domain, the other software this code interacts with, and the people in the organization who can help. How did they get that knowledge? By working on the system. Weinberg remarks that when …
One way to be a 10x developer is to write the system, so you know more about it that anyone else. I call this person the “purple developer.”
Y’know how sometimes a particular logged-in user isn’t authorized for some option, so you don’t show it to them? Don’t do that to people. Tell me it’s there, tell me I can’t do it, tell me who can. This is what happens when you hide it: Dave and I exist in different worlds, and we …
I wanted it to be turtles all the way down. (where turtles are objects, or functions)
But it isn’t…
In any large enough company, there are front-line workers, management, and executives. Executives set direction, management sets up the situation for the workers, and workers do the labor. Workers do the company business every day, providing capabilities to external or internal customers. Management gets them the tools and training they need, for today and for …
Code is like a coastline: the closer you look, the farther from here to there. Can we diminish this effect?
Standardization turns a craft into a knowledge-based industry, says Tiago Forte. Has that happened to software, with open-source libraries as standards?
“Plants are movers…. Plants grow to where they’re going.” Frazier, P. & Jamone, Lorenzo & Althoefer, Kaspar & Calvo, Paco. (2020). Plant Bioinspired Ecological Robotics. Frontiers in Robotics and AI. 7. 10.3389/frobt.2020.00079. This is a keynote written originally for a private company. I’ll do it at conferences, including YOW! in September 2020. Short bite: In …
Say you’re aiming for outcome-based product teams that write and operate software. Maybe you hire for roles in these teams like Software Developer, Product Owner, Designer, Tester. How do you define each role? We usually ask, what does each person do? A typical job description includes: what does the person do? What are they responsible …
Read moreDefine roles by what each person increasingly knows
Caring for software takes more knowledge than a single person can acquire. There’s the business knowledge that makes it useful, plus the languages and runtimes and infrastructure and deployment. Then there’s security, accessibility, user experience, each interface, availability, observability, scaling, performance, data modeling, testing, networking, etc etc. Every change to the software hits several of …