Developer tools: extend your reach (with some work)
Useful terminology: my tools are either ready-to-hand, unready-to-hand, or present-at-hand. I can notice the switch and deal with it consciously.
Systems Thinking
No Roadmaps for Worldbringers
Goals are for the smaller stuff,specifics of this week, todaybecause we can’t see far enoughto guess what new surprises laybeyond that. Top this nearest hilland pause to find the next clear way.A mountain in the distance stillcalls to us, and yet we staygrounded in the valley hereand set a goal not far away. Tomorrow, top …
Don’t build systems. Build subsystems.
Always consider your design a subsystem. Jabe Bloom When we build software, we aren’t building it in nowhere. We aren’t building a closed system that doesn’t interact with its environment. We aren’t building it for our own computer (unless we are; personal automation is fun). We are building it for a purpose. Chances are, we …
Closing the feedback loop from the customer
Feedback loops are essential to learning. In business, they’re essential to getting the product right. We need to know what the customers think, what they’re struggling with, what they value. There’s one department that has a lot of contact with customers. Whole conversations, where we can learn a lot about what frustrates people. Yet, customer …
Keynote: From Puzzles to Products
Blog post: From Puzzles to Products Abstract What will help you grow as a developer, skills or understanding?Which internal software has negative business value? When does correctness matter?Oh, and – can software save the world? Jessica looks to her own career and to the history of Cybernetics for answers — or better, more interesting questions.Follow her through solving puzzles to growing products and beyond. From Cold War rationality back to Enlightenment reason.Learn new ways to think about your career in software and a new way to talk about your systems. Past public deliveries VelocityConf, San Jose, June 2019. Video <- link Southeast Ruby, Nashville, August 2019
Give me feedback that is qualitative, broad, and random
Today in standup, a colleague reported that a GitHub isn’t sending the hooks it did last week, after we wrote code to handle it, and it’s a problem for us. “Did you contact GitHub?” “I asked around, and I heard they’re very unhelpful.” So no, he didn’t contact GitHub. The people writing that hook will …
Read moreGive me feedback that is qualitative, broad, and random
Let’s reason about behavior
When we learn math, geometry, and logic in school, we’re always talking about things that are holding still. The element is in the set or it isn’t. The angle is acute or obtuse or right or we can’t know. Things are related or not. A thing has a property, or doesn’t. Code can have properties. …
Mostly we orient
Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. This is the OODA loop, first recognized in fighter pilots and then in the Toyota Production System. It represents every choice of action in humans and higher level systems: take in sensory data, form a model of the world, choose the next action, make a change in the world. At least …
Implementing all the interfaces
Humans are magic because we are components of many systems at once. We don’t just build into systems one level higher, we participate in systems many levels higher and everywhere in between. In code, a method while is part of a class which is part of a library which is part of a service which …
Domain-specific laws
“there appear new laws and even new kinds of laws, which apply in the domain in question.” David Bohm, quoted by Alicia Juarrero He’s talking about the qualitative transformation that happens in a system when certain quantitative transition points are passed. Qualitative transformation I notice this when something that used to be a pain gets …