What matters most when I'm collaborating on activity X isn't activity X, it's collaborating. I've given this MCE series a lot of thought, which is why the items appear so slowly. My take seems fundamentally different from what others seem to be saying. And it doesn't feel like a tweak. It's not one premise of the zeitgeist I would change,…
In our trade, a great deal depends on the distinction between two ideas, manifested as behaviors, cutlures, practice-sets, attitudes, approaches, whatever you call it. I call these ideas "endpointing" and "nextstepping". The central thesis of endpointing: "There's a finish line, and it's what matters most." The central thesis of next-stepping: "There's no finish line, and what matters most is the…
TSD Development: First short TDD session pushed. I said I'd start yesterday, but instead I played a computer game most of the day. https://github.com/GeePawHill/tsd This was short and sweet, so there's just three simple points of interest, one noticed infrastructure problem, then I'll move on to the next part. POI #1: This was textbook TDD, as most toy problems are.…
TSD Development: The first thing to do is make a thing that accepts key-value pair assignments to make a tree. Since kotlin readily supports map-like assignments, the first minor-leage case looks like this: output["key"] = "value" That resembles a map, by design, but it isn't one. Later cases will elaborate this, but the secret sauce is two-fold, consisting of a…
My mindfulness works in large part by way of changing my identity, my sense of "who I am". Before I even inch into this, I just gotta remind you that you're reading the words of someone who is an obnoxious wise-cracking irreligious unspiritual foul-mouthed dirty-minded unmystical hardcore computer geek. It's important to say, because after all, we're about to talk…
The majority of the time, my successful collaborations begin deep within me, and so do my unsuccessful ones. (Part of the reason I've been so quiet these days since first talking about collaboration has been finding a way into my take. What is the most important story? How can I tell it? What advice, if any, does it yield? Consider…
So. What is TSD? It's a small library whose purpose is to make it easy to collect, render, compare, diff, and test tree-shaped data. Once we get past basic programming, it is very common to have to create orchestras of objects that form conceptual trees. Note, these aren't literal trees. Hmmm. Better talk about that. Consider my mp3 collection. A…
So. Hanna Thomas wrote an excellent article a few days back, here. When Lean-Agile methodologies are brought up in progressive spaces, they’re often met with a suspicious side-eye. After all, as Audre Lorde said, ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the… The article was briefly suppressed, but it was restored pretty quickly, and there it is. I told Hanna I'd…
I'd like to take a second to address a trope I see here and there about the founding of the agile community. It's the stuff about "old white men". Non-trigger warning: relax. This isn't a rant. BTW, I hate using the word "agile" for our movement, & usually use circumlocutions to avoid it. I believe that, as we grew, through…
Refactoring Pro-Tip: When I make tacit relationships explicit I nearly always improve my code. Once I move past syntactical refactorings into semantics, this is often my first set of moves. So what does this mean, "tacit" vs "explicit", in code? Maybe the easiest way to come at it is with a very dumb example. The simplest tacit relationship I can…