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Metrics and Three Traps

GeePaw July 3, 2020

Hey folks, let’s talk about three traps we fall into with metrics. (Before we begin, let me remind you, this is just comfort food: Stay safe. Stay strong. Stay kind. Stay angry. Black lives matter.) In twenty years of coaching software development teams, I’ve seen maybe a hundred or more orgs try to figure out how to measure their process, and the majority of them have fallen into some mix of three traps: 1) the more trap, 2) the objectivity

The Right Step

GeePaw June 30, 2020

Let’s talk about steps, a topic that’s relevant to my geekery interests, and maybe even a little relevant to the world outside of geekery today. (I feel weird writing right now. I am going to do it anyway, primarily because, like most long-term sufferers from illness, I live in mortal fear of relapse, and part of my remission seems based on finding my topic & voice in writing.) Don’t think that, by writing on geekery right now, that I’m trying

More on Small Steps

GeePaw June 26, 2020

Folks, I’ve been pretty quiet about geekery lately. I wrote about using my geekery content as a small dose of comfort food. I’m going to offer a little more, today. We can geek out a little, for relief, because you gotta care for yourself to care for others. But this is not any kind of "return to normal". We don’t want to return to normal, we want to press forward. Stay safe, stay strong, stay kind, stay angry. Black lives

Pull & Swarm

GeePaw June 26, 2020

Sooooooo. I’m gonna write a little bit about geekery. But I do want to frame it for you a little. Geekery is not very important right now. My country is in the throes of facing down a violent uprising by uniformed militia, spurred on by parts of the government. So, geekery, no. Not important. But, to me, and to many of my followers, thinking and talking about geekery is a kind of comfort food. Comfort doesn’t eliminate problems. But the

Microtest TDD: Economics

GeePaw June 19, 2020

The economic aspects of microtest TDD are inextricably tied to the operational aspects of it. If we concentrate only on the artifacts involved, we will lose the picture and misunderstand the value proposition. As a professional geek, the heart of my job is changing rigidly structured imperative text in collaboration with other humans, in order to meet a variety of locally or temporally aligned goals. That’s fancy talk for "I change code, in community, for money." The central event is

Hitting on Speakers (Rant-y)

GeePaw June 16, 2020

I want to talk about this thing where you see someone on stage/screen presenting material about geekery, you decide you’re attracted, and you send them mail or dm hitting on them. You must not do this. It is rude, unprofessional, and hurtful to many people. Stop it. There are a lot of arguments that sound like they’re either neutral to or in favor of this behavior. They are wrong, in detail, in logic, and in toto. Let’s take a look.

Microtest TDD: More Definition

GeePaw June 12, 2020

What’s a microtest, anyway? I write a ton of tests as I’m building code, and the majority of these are a particular kind or style of test, the microtest kind. Let’s talk about what I mean by that, today, then we’ll talk later about how that turns out to help me so much. A microtest is a small, fast, precise, easy-to-invoke/read/write/debug chunk of code that exercises a single particular path through another chunk of code containing the branching logic from

Microtest TDD: The Big Picture

GeePaw June 9, 2020

I think of my style of coding as "microtest TDD". That can be misleading for folks, so let’s take a walk over a few of the ideas, implicit and explicit, that make up the approach. First things first, bear the money premise in mind in all that follows, to wit: "I’m in this for the money." In the software trade, we make money by shipping more value faster. This is why I adopt these practices, because when I do them,

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