How I Work

The RAT: Rework Avoidance Theory

Rework Avoidance Theory, or RAT, is likely slowing your team down more than rework ever would. Let’s talk a little about that today. I am writing these geekery muses in a time of great turmoil, but for the most part they’re not addressing that crisis. They are momentary respite, for me, and hopefully for you. They’re not the main story. Stay safe. Stay strong. Stay angry. Stay kind. Black lives matter. Rework Avoidance Theory is a cluster of related ideas […]

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Turning Implicit into Explicit

Turning implicit understanding into explicit code is a great productivity & quality step. Let’s talk about some whys and hows for that idea. As we forge into the topic, please do remember, this is just comfort food, not the main story. I proudly support my friends & family who are working for change in the world, and encourage them to keep at it. Stay safe. Stay strong. Stay kind. Stay angry. Black lives matter. An implicit understanding is anything a

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Model-View, The Desktop, and TDD

Today, a basic topic: Model/View, the Desktop and TDD. Some geeky respite, and enjoy. We got a lotta work waiting for us after this break. Stay safe. Stay strong. Stay kind. Stay angry. Black lives matter. Demand different. The basic idea behind all Model/View schemes, and there are several of them, is just this: draw a thick line between what your program does and how your program shows what it does. In other words, it’s a compositional heuristic, guidance for

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Helping Your Downstream Collaborators

Let’s talk about ways to make life easier for downstream developers, be they front-end or dependent back-end people. (Folks, this is purposeful distraction. Respite is important, so enjoy some geekery, but geekery’s not going to get us out of this mess. Stay safe. Stay strong. Stay kind. Stay angry. Black lives matter.) Whether you have a bunch of front-end folks driven from your monolith, or you live in service-mesh land with dozens of microservices, the people downstream from you have

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Metrics and Three Traps

Hey folks, let’s talk about three traps we fall into with metrics. (Before we begin, let me remind you, this is just comfort food: Stay safe. Stay strong. Stay kind. Stay angry. Black lives matter.) In twenty years of coaching software development teams, I’ve seen maybe a hundred or more orgs try to figure out how to measure their process, and the majority of them have fallen into some mix of three traps: 1) the more trap, 2) the objectivity

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The Right Step

Let’s talk about steps, a topic that’s relevant to my geekery interests, and maybe even a little relevant to the world outside of geekery today. (I feel weird writing right now. I am going to do it anyway, primarily because, like most long-term sufferers from illness, I live in mortal fear of relapse, and part of my remission seems based on finding my topic & voice in writing.) Don’t think that, by writing on geekery right now, that I’m trying

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More on Small Steps

Folks, I’ve been pretty quiet about geekery lately. I wrote about using my geekery content as a small dose of comfort food. I’m going to offer a little more, today. We can geek out a little, for relief, because you gotta care for yourself to care for others. But this is not any kind of "return to normal". We don’t want to return to normal, we want to press forward. Stay safe, stay strong, stay kind, stay angry. Black lives

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Pull & Swarm

Sooooooo. I’m gonna write a little bit about geekery. But I do want to frame it for you a little. Geekery is not very important right now. My country is in the throes of facing down a violent uprising by uniformed militia, spurred on by parts of the government. So, geekery, no. Not important. But, to me, and to many of my followers, thinking and talking about geekery is a kind of comfort food. Comfort doesn’t eliminate problems. But the

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Microtest TDD: Economics

The economic aspects of microtest TDD are inextricably tied to the operational aspects of it. If we concentrate only on the artifacts involved, we will lose the picture and misunderstand the value proposition. As a professional geek, the heart of my job is changing rigidly structured imperative text in collaboration with other humans, in order to meet a variety of locally or temporally aligned goals. That’s fancy talk for "I change code, in community, for money." The central event is

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Microtest TDD: More Definition

What’s a microtest, anyway? I write a ton of tests as I’m building code, and the majority of these are a particular kind or style of test, the microtest kind. Let’s talk about what I mean by that, today, then we’ll talk later about how that turns out to help me so much. A microtest is a small, fast, precise, easy-to-invoke/read/write/debug chunk of code that exercises a single particular path through another chunk of code containing the branching logic from

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