Geekery

I heard from a coach yesterday, of another coach in a room full of coaches, suggesting that they fire a couple of geeks to wake the rest of the team up to following instructions. (I wasn’t there. It’s possible that this didn’t quite happen, possible it was a joke, possible it was a very junior […]

We talked about local mission: creating or exploiting openings through which we can step closer to who we wish we were. That’s vague, but vagueness is correct here: it’s an overarching mission, not a specific behavior. Today I want to get a little closer to some specific behaviors. Tho not all the way to nuts

I’ve got more to say about interactions between humans at that level just above behavior and just below openings, lots more. But I’m going to jump ahead, then circle back. I want to list a bunch of things I do during my coaching days. It’s likely only a partial list, and as always, I reserve

I spoze today is as good a day as any for me to start talking about what coaching is, about what I do and how and why. Tho I have these conversations in private, I have put off doing it here. I think it’s a mix of factors. Two amusing ones: i’m not very sure

We spoke of always-small-always-improve (ASAI), arguing for it as strategy against big-bang-change (BBC). In another part of the forest, someone has asked the question, "what if the cost of delay for starting small instead of going big is extreme?" A situation where a BBC is better because the cost of delay implementing ASAI is extreme

A little coaching theory today, eh? Coaches seek to change how things go. They see what is here and they think it could be better. In fact, they usually think it could be rather dramatically better — not worth the trouble of being a coach if not. And our clients want us to make things

This branching thing. The idea behind branching is that it provides advantages in situations where a code change is large. The idea behind non-branching is not to enter those situations. These two views seem very difficult to reconcile. I am a non-brancher. I push to head, I pull from head, I test on head, I

I mentioned endpointing yesterday. I’m always using geepaw-isms & expecting people to know what I mean. Endpointing is over-focus on eventual destination. In s/w, it’s seeing development as a long trip to a known destination on a known map. John Winthrop, a few centuries back, used "the city on the hill" to describe an endpoint,

Of all the bad advice the geek trades inherit from over-simplified manufacturing & engineering, perhaps the worst: "avoid changing code". Take a minute, and think of all the things the trade does to avoid changing code. Virtually every element of "big design up front" policy is based in this view. Long stretches for analysis, longer