Yesterday’s irritated blurt was a matter of feels, not an attempt to offer insight or ideas. I got some queries about it, so let me wipe that slate and be a little less irritated. For now, anyway. 🙂 In geekery — in all tool use beyond a certain point, but my focus here is on […]
Decomposition Rage Tweet Explained Read More »
Let’s talk a little bit about showing your working code to your product person. A basic recommendation, which will seem strange and likely freak you out the first time you hear it. Look to show your new stuff every day or two. I want to address here both the how and the why. The why
Showing Code Every Day Or Two Read More »
If we’re living now and always have been in the Age of Blurgs, then our strategy might change accordingly. Before I go to some ideas from the modern we got "The Age of Blurgs", and we got "Blurgs: Try Harder Won’t Work". We need some better ideas, and the modern synthesis has some. Today I
How The Modern Synthesis Tackles Blurgs Read More »
If we’re living now and always have been in the Age of Blurgs, then our strategy might change accordingly. Before I go to some ideas from the modern synthesis that are targeted at blurgs & blurging, tho, I want to point at one thing that won’t work, and why. What won’t work is "try harder",
Blurgs: Try Harder Won’t Work Read More »
Let’s define blurgs. A ‘blurg’ is an event where a programmer understanding of "what my code does" is not "what my code does". Blurgs are an everyday part of programming, of course. We are more often "interim" than at a sign-off point. But I mean to restrict for this conversation the idea of a blurg
The Age Of Blurgs Read More »
I’ve said in a bunch of different ways how skeptical I am of method. In software-for-money, applying method — structure, process, technique, algorithm, recipe, formula — seems to me to be so rarely successful across contexts as to be, idunno, the great collapsed souffle of the entire geek trade. By the time our abstraction-level has
Skeptical About Method: Another Stab Read More »
So. I dropped out of the conference scene by and large for a few years for a variety of reasons. The last couple of years I have been returning to it. I’m just home from two conferences in three weeks. I am not an extrovert, at conferences, I like to hang around with individuals or
Please Go Find Out Read More »
Always Small, Always Better, Always Wrong. This is the mantra for anyone who seeks change in virtually any genuinely complex environment. I’ve written a lot about small and better, but not so much about wrong, which is what I want to take up today, but first, a little refresher. The complex systems I deal with
Always Small, Always Better, Always Wrong Read More »
I’ve had some questions & comments about yesterday’s tweet: there are a million ways to slice stories. All the ones that slice it by layers are mistakes. Michael D. Hill (@GeePawHill) May 11, 2018 That’s natural and good and thanks to one and all. When one tweets a one-off like that, all pithy and telegraphic,
Slicing Stories? Don’t Use Horizontal Layers Read More »
I genuinely believe that nearly all the woe in software development, the whole socialtechnical enterprise, derives from the belief that we can sidestep increment & iteration, "a little better now" and "we’ll change it again later". This applies to the purest coding geekery, and it applies to the schmooshy marketing, and it applies to the
I&I: What Increment & Iterate Means Read More »
