Helping Geeks Produce for Over 40 Years.

My mission is to help people learn how to embrace change and harvest its value. Here you will find hundreds of free articles and videos covering software topics ranging from highly technical to broadly philosophical.

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📝 Recent Posts

Optimize for Our Humans

Leading Technical Change is a small, live, remote seminar aimed squarely at a single topic: Real Change in the Real World. A new cohort is open now: March 11,12,14, & 15, 10am to noon Eastern (UTC-5). There are just six seats available, so we can drill down on the actual situations in which you’re seeking change. https://www.geepawhill.org/courses/leading-technical-change/ To give you

Why Only Change Frames?

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Changing The Frame

Today I want to answer a question that, honestly, almost no one ever asks. Why are we changing frames, instead of getting rid of them altogether? Talking about change in the geek trades is a joy for me, but I’m even more interested in seeing change out in the world. Please think outside the monitor. Black Lives Matter. Why are

The Frame-Changing Triad

This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Changing The Frame

We started with the concept of the mental frame, a comparatively rigid & invisible construct which structures and guides nearly all our behaviors. Today, let’s take up the triad of powerful forces that we can use to change frames: community, narrative, and experience. https://www.geepawhill.org/2023/01/20/changing-the-frame/ As ever with me, though considering change in the geek trades is a pleasure, it is

Changing The Frame

This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Changing The Frame

For nearly everyone who seeks to facilitate change, the first faltering step is usually in the crafting of a persuasive argument.

Slowing Decisions Down

This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series Leading Technical Change

Here’s another technique card from my seminar, “Leading Technical Change”. We first get into midwifing change precisely because we want it to be smoother, easier, and faster. But sometimes, a coach needs not to rush a decision through, but to slow it down. It’s so exciting when our proposed change starts to catch fire, especially when major influencers in our

What About Failure?

This entry is part 4 of 5 in the series Leading Technical Change

If we’re going to enable and support change, we’re going to fail, more often than we succeed, and we want to bake that idea in, early on, lest we fail both more often, and potentially more disastrously. Here’s some thoughts around this NOT DEPRESSING topic. 🙂 The weirdest thing about all this: it’s actually rather hard to tell when you’ve

Can We Be Honest?

This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series Leading Technical Change

Can we be honest? If we’re going to be successful change midwives, honesty is very important. In this technique card from Leading Technical Change, I talk about some of the ins & outs of this complicated topic. The first point is urgent: Being honest means believing everything you say, not saying everything you believe. Honesty is really important, but people

Detail: Not The Long Game

I was gratified by the response to my first "detail" article. But I did note that many persons praised my article for its commitment to the long game. Framing the commitment, for a geek, to detail, as a long game, seems right, sounds right, cuz after all, we only ever care about quality in the long game. And this is

Slash the Load

This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series Leading Technical Change

The people who hire me ask me to help their teams make changes. Most of the time, my first step is to see how I can slash those teams’ load. Here’s a technique card from my seminar, “Leading Technical Change” Raw text of a technique card: Wait, what? First thing I do To me, this is dreadfully obvious, but for

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🎥 Latest Videos

Robot Worlds E05: A Making UI!

This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series Robot Worlds

A Making UI We’ve got a very crude skeleton running, let’s get it on the screen, inside a "making app"! If you want to follow along, the repo is at https://github.com/GeePawHill/robot-worlds. Transcript and captions coming soon . . .

Real Programming S01E09: Making A Start, Starting A Making

This entry is part 9 of 10 in the series Real Programming

Real Programming S01E09: Making A Start, Starting A Make? This time, we’re going to start our making app. What’s a making app? Come and see! If you want to follow along in the code, the project is at github. Hey. Welcome to Real Programming. The show where even after taking many months of break time, we still don’t have a

Three Software Engineering Coaches Get Coached By GeePaw Hill (FourScouts TV)

How much are you able to learn on your own? For some people, reading books, articles, and going to certain training courses are all they need to keep steadily growing their skillset. For teams however, things are a bit more challenging. Retrospectives are indeed a great help, but these are still from the team’s own perspective. Sending a team to

Real Programming S01E03: Baby Needs New Shoes!

This entry is part 3 of 10 in the series Real Programming

Real Programming S01E03: Baby Needs New Shoes! Watching those itty-bitty numbers for the dice is making me crazy, so let’s get some dice images going today! If you want to follow along in the code, the project is https://github.com/geepawhill/yz Transcript Hey there. Welcome to episode 3 of Real Programming, the show where we’re still trying to figure out what our

Real Programming S01E02: Look, Ma! A Test!

This entry is part 2 of 10 in the series Real Programming

Real Programming S01E02: Look, Ma! A Test Last time we did a rapid-fire model/view split, just so we could test. Now we gotta test this bad boy a little! If you want to follow along in the code, the project is https://github.com/geepawhill/yz Hey, it’s GeePaw and I still have Wally, and Molly’s off camera, and we’re back with Real Programming:

Real Programming S01E01: Getting Started | Video

This entry is part 1 of 10 in the series Real Programming

(Video: https://vimeo.com/448155181) Real Programming S01E01: Getting Started Hi Folks! In this first episode we lay the groundwork for a simple desktop Yahtzee application. If you want to follow along in the code, the project is https://github.com/geepawhill/yz Transcript Hey, folks. It’s GeePaw sitting out here on my deck, where I do most of my work in the summer months. And today

Kontentment And Human Arcs

Aight. I been away from programming for a couple of months, but there was a reason I started talking the other day about the kontentment project: I’m wanting mucho change in it. For a talk I’m giving, I want the ability to draw human arcs, with the same ease with which I can draw human lines. So I set out

TDD & The Lump Of Coding Fallacy | Video

Hey, it’s GeePaw, and if you’re just starting to look at TDD, refactoring, the modern technical synthesis, we need to start with a couple of minutes about the Lump Of Coding fallacy. You’re a working geek: you spend your days coding for money to add value to your company. And one day some random schmoe like me comes up to

Coaching? Like People | Video

Hey, there, it’s GeePaw! And you are watching the first ever GeePaw video aimed specifically at coaches. I hope you like it. Do you know what the first absolute prerequisite for being a successful software development coach is? You have to like people. You have to like people. You have to like their style. You have to like their resistance.

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