Back when software was a craft
Standardization turns a craft into a knowledge-based industry, says Tiago Forte. Has that happened to software, with open-source libraries as standards?
Software Development
Grow to where we’re going
“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 …
Define roles by what each person increasingly knows
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 …
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Software development is like geriatrics
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 …
Developers are system changers
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 …
Shared Values are Overrated
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 …
Mutual Purpose and Agreed-Upon Methods
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. …
Symmathecist (n)
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 …
How I broke (and fixed) docs.atomist.com
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 …
Advancing the bridge
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 …