Change

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

Coaching, Pro-Tip, Geekery, 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 […]

Change Pro-Tip: All The Knobs A Little, All The Knobs A Little See Full Post

My Agility 2: The Made-For?

Change / / 2 minutes of reading
This entry is part [part not set] of 3 in the series Defining Agile

Seen a few soft murmurings about the idea that the made, the making, and the maker includes the made-for. That’s good. If the idea doesn’t work, let’s change it so it does. I do want to toss some grist into the mill that might have impact. In some of what i’m seeing, "children" could easily be substituted for "made-for". As in, "think of the chiiiiiildren". Others are a tad more hard-nosed, if not quite mercenary about it: they say "made-for"

My Agility 2: The Made-For? See Full Post

My Agility 1: A Working Formulation

Change / / 3 minutes of reading
This entry is part [part not set] of 3 in the series Defining Agile

A formulation I’m trying out today: "my agility is an autopoietic community centered around the triple balancing of the made, the making, and the makers." there’s odd terms in it, and also missing ones, so I feel like pushing it around a little out loud. Obviously, the least ordinary term there is the a-word. Autopoeisis is literally "self creation", and when I say that, I say "well why use a big fancy word," and the answer is: because the literal

My Agility 1: A Working Formulation See Full Post

Method’s the Wrong Place To Look

Change / / 1 minute of reading
This entry is part [part not set] of 3 in the series Defining Agile

There’s an old joke: A policeman comes across a drunk crawling around under a streetlamp, asks him what’s up. Drunk says he lost his car keys. So the cop helps him look for a while. But no luck, so the cop asks him, "Where’s your car, sir?" and the guy points off in the dark. Cop says, well, why are we looking over here, when your car is over there? Drunk says, "Well, because the light’s better here." There are

Method’s the Wrong Place To Look See Full Post

Building the Wrong Thing

Change, TDD, Geekery / / 3 minutes of reading

Folks worry a lot about building the wrong thing, that is, making software that does not please the many and different interests of the org, the users, the operators. I’ve certainly seen that. We all have. Government seems particularly consistent at doing it, tho surely there are plenty of commercial orgs that have the same problem. I see this problem differently from most folks. I’d like to take a few tweets and walk through my approach. The key insight for

Building the Wrong Thing See Full Post

Slinging Advice and Where I Come From With It

Change, Geekery / / 2 minutes of reading

So, I’m out there slinging advice about how to change the world of being a professional programmer. Maybe y’all need to hear some things about that, that might not have occurred to you. I am just some schmoe. I am having a successful life in the world of geekery. There are a host of causes for that, among them my dumb luck, and also among them the way I approach and enact the work. I like to talk about this,

Slinging Advice and Where I Come From With It See Full Post

We’re In TDD For The Money

Geekery, TDD, Change / / 4 minutes of reading
This entry is part [part not set] of 9 in the series Underplayed Premises

Time, this morning, to return to the underplayed TDD premise called the money premise. In one phrase: "We’re in this for the money." What does that mean? In the software business, like every other business in a long period of very high demand, we make more money when we ship more value faster. Please be careful here. When we say "more value faster", we’re not trying to constrain the possible varieties of value. THIS IS AN INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT THING TO

We’re In TDD For The Money See Full Post

How to Grow and Keep Geeks

Coaching, Change, Geekery / / 5 minutes of reading

So, in recent muses, i’ve tried to establish that our next step is a) restructuring economy to b) grow & keep geeks. How? What changes do I make in my org, assuming that I have restructured the economy to give me space to do so, to increase the org’s ability to grow and keep geeks? In no particular order, then, here are a bunch of ideas about this. 1: Stop hiring people whose chief attribute is their capacious memory for

How to Grow and Keep Geeks See Full Post

Growing and Keeping Geeks

Change, Coaching, Geekery / / 5 minutes of reading

From yesterday’s dark muse, this: i need stronger geeks. But I can't *get* stronger geeks without attending first and foremost to *growing* them and *keeping* them. — Michael D. Hill (@GeePawHill) August 12, 2018 #### Let’s go there. I believe we are consistently failing in the geek trade. By failing, I mean that we who do the work do not broadly satisfy those for whom we do it. If we were selling some service or commodity that could be substituted

Growing and Keeping Geeks See Full Post

Restructuring the Debts In The Geek Trade

Change, Coaching, Geekery / / 3 minutes of reading

It seems to me that a very great deal of "agile" advice has an implicit prefix, "assuming your team is close to healthy," you should … The assumption of reasonable health just — to put it as gently as I can manage — doesn’t seem like the sort of assumption we should be making. The industry — agile & otherwise — is in terrible shape. The demand for geekery seems to rise year after year, and it brings with it

Restructuring the Debts In The Geek Trade See Full Post

Scroll to Top