People use the word "discipline" reasonably often when they talk about the software trade. I tend to avoid that word, and I wish more folks followed me in that policy. Most of those folks are not meaning anything untoward. They might easily use "orderly", "consistent", "persistent", "systematic", and so on, instead of "discipline", and as […]
Discipline: A Short Rant Read More »
Programming Interviews For Dummies. I know it’s a horrible world out there, and there’s so much more bad than this. Still, it saddens me, on several vectors at once. Okay, well, I’ve had four people ask me about this, and I happen to have this soapbox sitting right here, so what the hell. Before anything
Programming Interviews For Dummies Read More »
Well, Change-Harvesters, I want so badly to connect up the dots from these previous muses about the topic and tie them back to the concrete realities of professional software development. But I can’t. Yet. I can’t yet. We have just a little further to go. When we talked about "if all you have is a
Frames: Build, Race, and More Read More »
The central concept of a dynamic unity is change-harvesting: make a change, harvest its value, use that value to make another change, over and over, change after change, world without end. We spoke the other day about how tools shape problems. "If all you have is a hammer, all you will see are nails." It
Change-Harvesting: The How Read More »
Reframing ourselves around change-harvesting involves several important concepts or concept-clusters. Maybe the most basic of these is the idea of a “dynamic unity”. Let’s go there. We call a thing a "unity" because we experience it as a whole thing. It has an inside and an outside and a border. It might be made up
Change-Harvesting and the Dynamic Unity Read More »
RAMPS — Affecting Safety Affecting safety, the sense of belonging — being valued & accepted — is about creating a stabilizing center-of-mass built around health. A note: none of what I have to say here is relevant if your organization ignores violence, or hasn’t already taken the steps necessary to end overt racism, sexism, age-ism,
RAMPS – Ways to Affect Safety Read More »
Announcement: The Change-Harvesting Camerata is officially launched today! There’s a special launch offer. Read on, to get more info about the camerata itself, and find out the launch deal. A camerata — h/t Jess Kerr for that term — is a group of people working on a common problem, both together and separately. Part salon,
The Camerata is Launched! Read More »
Safety — the sense of being valued and accepted, of belonging — is a powerful motivator for many individuals. A lack of safety often seems like a simple switch, instantly shutting down talented and capable people. (This topic of safety is a minefield right now. The absence of a safe place to stand today seems,
RAMPS – S is for Safety Read More »
A respondent asks, "Are you always able to practice what you preach? I don’t mean intentionally dropping but unintentionally as your mind is sloppy. I have great difficulties in applying 100% of my "knowledge" 100% of the time." Sometimes questions open up huge areas with lots of issues and subtexts and angles, and this is
How I Work – Preaching And Practicing Read More »
RAMPS: Affecting Purpose Raising a sense of purpose — service to a "greater" — in someone who’s sensitive to it, involves offering purposes and then connecting to them. I try not to frame these muses as mere critique. This one’s hard for me to pull off. Clumsy ham-handed misleading efforts at motivating people via purpose
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