When I was geek-young, not quite forty years ago, I worked in a tiny two-person shop, and we were entirely without "method". We just wrote code. At that time, there were plenty of analysts of geekery, and they were certainly writing about how to geek, but 1) their ideas were seen as more of a […]
No One Way: GeePaw On Method Read More »
Of all the routine requests I get from clients, the one I find most difficult to deal with is this: "Help us choose a metric so we can tell if things are going well." the problem is that "numbers as health indicators" is so deeply embedded in our worldviews, so deeply correct on paper, and
The First Metric: How Are You Feeling? Read More »
Possible causal point for a failure to value TDD: geeks thinking the main source of bugs in professional software is not handling the main case successfully. In any feature in any app, there are one or more primary cases. A given story is likely to be concerned with one of these at a time. When
TDD & The Geek-Young: Is Tdd Right For Noobs? Read More »
I’m bettin’ u already got some code. If yer a geek in a substantial code base in an org w/more than a half-dozen other geeks, i’m bettin’ u already got a lot of code. In your team’s head, if not somewhere on an out-of-date piece of paper, there is a picture of "our code". I
The Rigorous Playpen Read More »
Companies spend a great deal of time and energy seeking to get their teams synchronized. Several forces motivate these efforts. It’s worth taking a second to look at these. One force: the belief that synchronization provides steering points. The notion here is that since we’ve just synchronized, now is a good time to react to
Sync Points Reduce Our Trade’s Effectiveness Read More »
So. This is hard for me to approach. The circumstance of my radicalism began when I was but 5 years old. At age seven, under pressure, I became aware that some adults were dumb-asses. By the sixth grade, age twelve, I saw most things around me lies. I encountered people I thot were good and
Desiderata: On Motives Read More »
Software development is a temporal activity: it takes place over time. Any temporal activity can be shown as a series of snapshots. This is a way of "speeding them up", usually for the purposes of analysis or instruction. It’s a kind of "as if" thing. For some kinds of thinking, we can just elide, ignore,
The Hardest Problem In The Geek Trades Read More »
So, apropos the earlier muse that was fairly muddled about the hardest problem in the geek trades today… I can’t think of a better way to describe what I do as a geek than to speak as if we were playing one of those wild modern world-building games. Lately, i’ve been playing Oxygen Not Included,
The “Software For Money” Game Read More »
If u think the semaphore mechanism in your library works, then test to the level of setting the semaphore. If u think it doesn’t work, then u need another library or o/s. Testing across threads is for people who are testing semaphores. If u think that your JSON transport works — from your UI’s perspective
What TDD Tests Prove Read More »
When you think back to first generation Hamurabi, and then play Oxygen Not Included, or Civilization or any of the other current world-builder games, you see the power of steady accretion of improvement. Do you know that all of this has happened well within my lifetime? I played Hamurabi in 1979, killing time in the
Take A Minute To Just Marvel: GeePaw on Coaching Read More »
