Muses

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 […]

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

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