GeePaw

HTTP Clients #2: The Cost of Thin

Change, Coaching / / 6 minutes of reading
This entry is part [part not set] of 3 in the series HTTP Clients

Yesterday, we started with thin (i.e. browser) clients versus fat (i.e. app) clients. We considered the alleged benefits of thin, which I believe we routinely overestimate. Today I want to talk about the costs, which I believe we routinely underestimate. I mentioned the other day how much I prefer a fat-client approach to today’s standard and largely unquestioned reliance on browser-based solutions. I want to step into it, even knowing I’m gonna get yelled at. Please do check the admissions […]

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HTTP Clients #1: The Benefit of Thin?

Change, Coaching / / 4 minutes of reading
This entry is part [part not set] of 3 in the series HTTP Clients

I mentioned the other day how much I prefer a fat-client approach to today’s standard and largely unquestioned reliance on browser-based solutions. I want to step into it, even knowing I’m gonna get yelled at. Freely made admissions to start: 1) I admit there are situations where a browser is best. 2) I admit that some modern internet-stack environments are better than others. 3) I admit that most of what I’m critiquing is today’s typical practice, not necessarily "what is

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From Procedural to Human

Change, Coaching, Pro-Tip / / 4 minutes of reading

Yesterday, we talked about Alice’s City On The Hill and her approach to getting there. I offered, instead of the Alice approach, an approach that was Human, Taken, Local, and Iterative. Today, let’s consider this business of Procedural -> Human. Every system for making software is a mixed system, with three kinds of thing in it: the human kind, the artifact kind, and the procedural kind. Humans are, you know, persons. Artifacts are things like the code, the tools, the

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Alice’s Approach To Change

Coaching, Pro-Tip, Change / / 5 minutes of reading

Change Pro-Tip: It’s common, but mistaken, to believe that some change I want to make will be procedural, given, sweeping, and final. Let’s imagine someone, we’ll call her Alice. Alice is a mid-level manager, a department head let’s say, neither quite at the top nor quite at the bottom. She’s got some power, but not all the power, and she has a very strong desire to change how her organization works. You see, Alice has a vision — inspired perhaps

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What We Can’t Change

Change, Coaching, Pro-Tip / / 6 minutes of reading

Change Pro-Tip: We can’t (purposefully) change what we don’t sense, what we don’t talk about, or what we assume can’t be changed. I remind myself of this one a lot, because it’s easy to forget in the middle of the circus that passes for professional software development. Changing things means going from A to B in, idunno, operational space. For me to do that well, I need awareness of A. I have to be able to sense what I or

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Change Pro-Tip: Lining Up The Betters

Change, Coaching, Pro-Tip / / 4 minutes of reading

Changing Pro-Tip: When I remember to line up the"betters", so my "better" is their "better" is his or her "better", my changes go a lot better. A refresher, my definition of coaching is "Creating or exploiting openings through which individuals, including sometimes myself, can step closer to who they wish they were." This is all about "better". When I am being paid to make changes in organizations, there are always a bunch of these "betters" floating around. There’s almost always

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Change Pro-Tip: All The Knobs A Little, All The Knobs A Little

Pro-Tip, Geekery, Coaching, Change / / 4 minutes of reading

Change Pro-Tip: All the knobs a little, all the knobs a little, over and over again, is how I’ve make my most successful changes, in code and organizations alike. A while back, I mused first about "Always Small, Always Improve" and I later elaborated "Always Small, Always Better, Always Wrong". Lo these two decades ago, we characterized eXtreme Programming as turning all the knobs to 11. I’ve always loved that metaphor, and I still believe in it. But my strategy

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Geekery Pro-Tip: Think Less, Sense More

Geekery, Pro-Tip, TDD / / 4 minutes of reading

Geekery Pro-Tip: I frequently remind myself: Think Less, Sense More. It’s advice I give to me all over the place, from the most technical parts of the sociotechnical fractal to the most social parts of it. It’s an odd thing to say, so we better dig in to it a little. I’ve recently come from a conference. This was a good one for me, full of old friends and new, smart crazy passionate people coming together to figure out what

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TDD Pro-Tip: Design Until Nervous Optimism

Pro-Tip, TDD, Geekery / / 5 minutes of reading

TDD Pro-Tip: Before I write the first test in a new context, I usually design until I get to a state of "Nervous Optimism". A couple of days ago, I was party to some drinking geekery with my colleagues at a hookah bar restaurant dance club. It was the end of a long day, and we were unwinding and being pretty silly. My three partners in crime mobbed on "Evil Hangman", a fun little game. And I sat off to

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Culture Starch: We Haven’t Grasped Complexity Yet

Geekery, Sociotechnical, The Whole Geek, Culture Starch / / 5 minutes of reading

Sitting here, listenin’ to my playlist, thinking about temporality and how it relates to the kind of geekery I want to write and talk and teach and geek about. Over the last 10 years or so, the topics deriving from systems theory, from complexity theory, and so on, have wormed their way slowly into our mental frame. Just a little, just a little, but that’s how change works. And as I read the popular accounts, as well as the folk-theory

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