So, a friend asked me to say more about "not pairing". As so often, it triggered me to muse. Sometimes I need to not pair. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love pairing. I love it for three reasons. It makes me a better geek. That is, I learn from pairing. Pairing makes two geeks more productive than if they solo’d. That is a pair writes mo’ better code than two solos. PAIRING IS AWESOMELY MORE FUN. But there are …
I am done with "technical debt" as a useful concept. As so often happens, an appealing idea happened, one with useful connections to the concrete, and we took it and ran with it. Unfortunately, that idea has more appeal than it does decision-making value. Folks justify the most ridiculous nonsense and put it under the heading of "technical debt". In particular, they write shitty code, I mean terrible code. They do this in the name of productivity. The claim is …
There’s a lot of internet out there about meetings. Sturgeon’s law applies here. There’s some good advice, tho, too. Where I come from’s different. What I see, as with so many other topics, is how hard we try to fix problems our assumptions created. There are a lot different ends to which folks want to apply meetings as means. Three common ends are the "orders meeting", the "report meeting", and the "decision meeting". In an orders meeting, we’re there so …
