October 2022

Can We Be Honest?

Leading Technical Change / / 4 minutes of reading
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 quite often over-share in the name of pursuing honesty. Every healthy person, for instance, has moments of extreme negativity. Our […]

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Detail: Not The Long Game

TDD, Programming, How I Work, Coding, Detail / / 3 minutes of reading

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 why y’all can’t convince anyone to do this or think this or feel this. When does a bad variable name

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Slash the Load

Coaching, Change Harvesting, Leading Technical Change / / 4 minutes of reading
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 a lot of folks seeking change, it comes as a completely shocking idea. The weirdest part, though, is that it

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Detail: Series Intro

Detail, Coding, How I Work, Programming, TDD / / 6 minutes of reading

Detail: The thing that strikes me over and over again, in my own work style, in my Friday group’s analytics, in Ron’s long-running Kotlin and short-running Gilded Rose series, is how much attention high-skill geeks pay to some of the smallest details in the code. An example. I was doing Gilded Rose the other day, first time in years, and we start with the ugly method, which we’re asked to add a feature to, following certain constraint rules to make

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Joy Project: FGNO Plotter

How I Work / / 4 minutes of reading

Joy project: Today’s a comparatively light work day, so I’m gonna lay out what I’m actually trying to do with this project. The source, btw, is at: GitHub – GeePawHill/fgno-plotter Playtime project for the fgno meetup. Contribute to GeePawHill/fgno-plotter development by creating an account on GitHub. Feel free to poke around. There are a bunch of simultaneous missions going on with fgno-plotter, which is why it’s a joy and learning project. "fgno", btw, is an abbreviation of "Friday Geek’s Night

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TDD Pro-Tip: Against Automated Macrotests

Coding, How I Work, Programming, TDD / / 9 minutes of reading

TDD Pro-Tip: I advocate against automated macro-tests — those whose base is entire running programs –, as their cost is high and their benefit is doubtful. I very rarely write them. There is a bewildering variety of terminology out there around what I’m calling macro-tests, so let’s poke around a little. The central idea of "macro-test" is that we write code that launches an entire subject program and probes its behavior "from the outside". There are often multiple programs in

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