April 2018 – GeePawHill.org

Beating The Human Wave Strategy In The Geek Trades

Geekery / April 27, 2018

The seemingly insatiable demand for geekery creates a marketplace with many opportunities, but also many powerful distortions. Among them, the one that seems most puzzling to me is the trade’s notable disregard for the urgency of enculturating the "makers making" upon whom the entire business proposition rests. Successful geekery requires individual humans using individual judgment. […]

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Sticky Change: Changers Feel Better

Geekery, Coaching / April 23, 2018

Yesterday, this popped out. two very common misconceptions: 1) that it is possible to organize your way into agility. 2) that the secret to sticky change is anything other than “changers feel better”. Michael D. Hill (@GeePawHill) April 19, 2018 Today I want to elaborate a little on that second point, that sticky change happens

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Agility Perks From Below

Geekery / April 23, 2018

Plumbers make this joke on day one of having a new hire. "The first law of plumbing: shit flows downhill." That line probably pre-dates western civilization. It’s good to make a noobie kid laugh a little nervously. Agility doesn’t flow downhill. Agility doesn’t flow downhill, it perks up from below. In one sentence, this is

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The Technical Meaning Of Microtest

Geekery, TDD / April 16, 2018

I write things called "microtests" to do my development. Doing this yields me greater success than I’ve had using any other technique in a 40-year career of geekery, so I advocate, wanting to share the technique far & wide. Before we can talk seriously about how or whether this works, we need a strong grasp

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Success Theater, Corruption, and My Own Medicine

Coaching / April 14, 2018

The more I work higher up the chain, the more I encounter folks who are openly seeking success theater, w/no interest or concern for actual value. This observation blinded me for many years. I have an odd-shaped-to-some but very strong sense of personal responsibility, myself, and I am no less prone to moralizing judgments than

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How Long? (Technique Re-Mix)

Modern-Synthesis, Geekery / April 14, 2018

How long (redux)? In the technical side of the modern synthesis, we develop code by writing and passing tests then re-working the code to make it as change-enabled as we can. The key "how long" aspect to this: how long does the code stay not working? That is, how long in between the times we

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TDD & The Lump Of Coding Fallacy | Video

TDD, Programming / April 14, 2018

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

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How Long?

Modern-Synthesis, Geekery / April 13, 2018

How long? What amount of time passes between you saving the file you just changed and you seeing the results of that change? If that answer is over 10 seconds you might want to wonder if you can make it shorter. If that answer is over 100 seconds, please consider making a radical change in

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TDD: Resist Integration Tests

Modern-Synthesis, Geekery, TDD / April 4, 2018

The expense of an integration test can be extremely high. Consider the contentment app. This app makes drawings 1) that distribute across time, as if they were being drawn live in front of you, 2) that are generated stochastically, 3) with a "pixel-inaccessible" framework. Now, it’s important to understand that none of these problems are

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My TDD Isn’t Judging Your Responsibility

Modern-Synthesis, Geekery, TDD / April 1, 2018

An old blog of mine, We’re In This For The Money, recently got some attention, delighting me, of course. A full h/t to Jim Speaker @jspeaker for that! He quoted me thus: Too busy to #TDD? Too busy to pair? Too busy to #refactor? Too busy to micro-test? I call bullshit. My buddy Erik Meade

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