Communication is hard, but sometimes I can fix it.
When coding with an agent gets tricky, use the agent to make it less tricky.
Yak Shaving
Resilience and Waste in Software Teams
Resilience is coping with unexpected events and environmental change. To have resilience, you need slack. Slack in software development lets people do the little tasks that keep the work moving smoothly. That helps with everything you didn’t know you needed the software to do.
One key trick to becoming a wizard developer
Why dig into problems that you could work around? Three reasons: one about my work, one about the team, and one about me.
talk: Shaving the Golden Yak
Abstract Programming is a series of frustrations. Everything we do, we could do better or faster if we only had our tools set up just so. If our error messages were a little better, our code a little cleaner, our tests a lot wider. When we spend time on this, it’s known as “yak shaving,” … Read moretalk: Shaving the Golden Yak
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.
Run Alloy on Windows in Docker
TL;DR: install docker and X410; docker run jessitron/alloy:5.1 The essential work in software development is forming a model in our heads of the system we want. The code is one expression of this model. The code can’t be stronger than this model. So I want a strong model: consistent, complete enough, and expressive. I decided … Read moreRun Alloy on Windows in Docker
The Golden Yak
(This post continues from the Royal Yak, and concludes the series A Taxonomy of Yaks.) When we improve how we work, we make tasks faster. We make progress smoother. This is magnified when we improve how all our team members work, or our whole community. Now and then, though, an improvement turns into something more: … Read moreThe Golden Yak
The Royal Yak
(continued from Trim Yaks; part of the Taxonomy of Yak Shaving series) Royal Yak, aka Yakkity Yak (quote from yakbreeder.com) Talking to people is yak shaving; it is an intermediate task that helps you get your official tasks done. It’s usually seen as a separate way to “waste” time. I’m here to call relationship-building out … Read moreThe Royal Yak
Trim Yaks
(continued from Imperial Yaks; part of A Taxonomy of Yak Shaving series) Trim Yaks, aka, the Hackhacking yak (making coding faster) Each of the previous yaks stood in the way of a particular task. The Trim Yak is not so task-specific; these are the ones that let us work faster generally. I nickname them “Hackhacking Yaks” … Read moreTrim Yaks
The Imperial Yaks
(continued from Attack Yak; series begins with Taxonomy of Yak Shaving) Sometimes you’re coding along, writing tests as little experiments “this should fail because I haven’t implemented the parser for it yet” — and it fails in a way you didn’t expect. And then you start digging and the parsing library isn’t working how you expected. And … Read moreThe Imperial Yaks