Coaching

I am done with "technical debt" as a useful concept. As so often happens, an appealing idea happened, one with useful connections to the concrete, and we took it and ran with it. Unfortunately, that idea has more appeal than it does decision-making value. Folks justify the most ridiculous nonsense and put it under the heading of "technical debt". In particular, they write shitty code, I mean terrible code. They do this in the name of productivity. The claim is

I find 4 major failings in both how & what we teach in geekery. We mostly don’t. That is, actual teaching of actual geekery-for-a-living is almost non-existent. We suffer in attitude & content & structure from the trivially flawed “information transfer” view of what teaching & learning is. We purport to more knowledge than we actually have, teaching crude guesses as if they were writ, and aphorisms as if they were Euclid. We withdraw the field, abrogating our responsibility and

Still feeling it, so, a sidebar on choosing which coaching stories to work… I was raised in XP, and as such, I imbibed the concept of "most important story" heavily. When I’d show up at these shops, I’d be replete with the wonder of myself, and I’d look out on the horizon of broken things, and I’d pick. And I picked "the most important story". To me, that meant the thing that is most ruining their ability to ship. But

These wrangles over system seem mis-focused. Moreover, they seem part of the surface of the elephant i’ve been trying to describe. A system is inherently an abstraction. It compresses, filters, selects, features from an experienced reality. We formulate systems for at least 3 reasons. First, so we can establish commonality. That is, we can use one system to describe a bunch of "different" local realities. We can say, "yes, that’s python and the web, that’s c and the pacemaker, but

Defining Agile Sooooo, I saw a couple folks arguing earlier about what is or isn’t Agile. That’s okay. People do that. Analytical people thrive on doing that. Anyone who’s gotten to the level of journeyfolk in any arena will seek to define that arena. All very healthy stuff. Nowadays I tend to avoid these arguments. I have my reasons. First, there is no definition anywhere on earth of anything that can’t be abused or misused willfully or not. There is

User Stories If you are concerned about how you write a user story, you have missed the entire point. A user story is a little card that reminds us of all the actual conversations we’re currently actually having. If the words "bathtub farting" are enough for the team to actually converse about what they signify, they’re enough for what they’re for. The very first step you take that’s away from "user story is a marker" is the road back to