May 2021

Path-Focused Design

Change Harvesting, Modern-Synthesis, Programming / / 8 minutes of reading

"Path-focused design", of stories, architecture, code, is design that understands that we can only reach a distant City on the Hill by taking one stride-limited shipping step at a time. Sunday muse-day, comfort food for the geek in me and in you, but please remember, we don’t really just want to change code, we want to change the world. Stay safe, stay strong, stay angry, stay kind. Black Lives Matter. In the software design theory of the ’80s and ’90s, […]

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Big Batch Releases

Modern-Synthesis, Programming / / 8 minutes of reading

Big-batch releases, coordinated and controlled by a central intelligence, fail, and fail frequently. Several aspects of this are fascinating, because of the interplay of hard mathematical reality with human frailty. Let’s take a swing. It’s Sunday muse-day, comfort food for the geekery-inclined. Enjoy, take respite, but don’t forget we want to change a lot more than just code. Black Lives Matter. Stay safe, stay strong, stay angry, stay kind. We can characterize releases by the number of stories in them.

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Sharing Configurations

How I Work, Change Harvesting, Modern-Synthesis / / 6 minutes of reading

You can put all your configuration in a shared library and eliminate just about every mis-configuration in your multi-process application. It’s not free, but it’s cheap, and it kills a lot of minor pain. Let’s take a gander. It’s Sunday geek comfort-food time. I hope you enjoy it, and I also hope you remember it’s not the most important story out there. Please keep working for change, once you’re rested. Stay safe, stay strong, stay kind, stay angry. Black Lives

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Re-Orienting Around Backsteps

Change Harvesting, Modern-Synthesis / / 7 minutes of reading

When large teams struggle with trunk-based development (TBD) or continuous integration/deployment (CI/CD), a good strategy is to re-orient how the teams face "backsteps", moments in our workflow where a discovery forces us to re-open a stage we thought was closed. It’s been a hard stretch for those of us seeking peace and equity. I offer this geekery not to suggest it matters as much as that does, but only to give us a little respite. Stay safe, stay strong, stay

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