Muses

Please Go Find Out

So. I dropped out of the conference scene by and large for a few years for a variety of reasons. The last couple of years I have been returning to it. I’m just home from two conferences in three weeks. I am not an extrovert, at conferences, I like to hang around with individuals or small groups. And I am drawn to smart weird people, because reasons. I am one of those people who prefers intimacy and authenticity in my […]

Please Go Find Out See Full Post

Always Small, Always Better, Always Wrong

Always Small, Always Better, Always Wrong. This is the mantra for anyone who seeks change in virtually any genuinely complex environment. I’ve written a lot about small and better, but not so much about wrong, which is what I want to take up today, but first, a little refresher. The complex systems I deal with professionally all fall under the simple problem statement: "make software for money". Those systems include lots of different aspects and layers. Two of these, at

Always Small, Always Better, Always Wrong See Full Post

Slicing Stories? Don’t Use Horizontal Layers

I’ve had some questions & comments about yesterday’s tweet: there are a million ways to slice stories. All the ones that slice it by layers are mistakes. Michael D. Hill (@GeePawHill) May 11, 2018 That’s natural and good and thanks to one and all. When one tweets a one-off like that, all pithy and telegraphic, folks who may not “already speak the lingo” can be mystified. I’ll take a few tweets to spell it out a little further. A little

Slicing Stories? Don’t Use Horizontal Layers See Full Post

I&I: What Increment & Iterate Means

I genuinely believe that nearly all the woe in software development, the whole socialtechnical enterprise, derives from the belief that we can sidestep increment & iteration, "a little better now" and "we’ll change it again later". This applies to the purest coding geekery, and it applies to the schmooshy marketing, and it applies to the structures and process. It applies everywhere we make changes, and in software, everywhere we make changes is everywhere. When I make attacks on certainty, i’m

I&I: What Increment & Iterate Means See Full Post

Beating The Human Wave Strategy In The Geek Trades

The seemingly insatiable demand for geekery creates a marketplace with many opportunities, but also many powerful distortions. Among them, the one that seems most puzzling to me is the trade’s notable disregard for the urgency of enculturating the "makers making" upon whom the entire business proposition rests. Successful geekery requires individual humans using individual judgment. That judgment is backed by a number of factors, two of which seem predominant: the range of experience of the judge, and the community in

Beating The Human Wave Strategy In The Geek Trades See Full Post

Sticky Change: Changers Feel Better

Yesterday, this popped out. two very common misconceptions: 1) that it is possible to organize your way into agility. 2) that the secret to sticky change is anything other than “changers feel better”. Michael D. Hill (@GeePawHill) April 19, 2018 Today I want to elaborate a little on that second point, that sticky change happens when the changers feel better. All three words of “changes feel better” carry weight, have subtleties, and present possible fail points, so let’s look at

Sticky Change: Changers Feel Better See Full Post

Agility Perks From Below

Plumbers make this joke on day one of having a new hire. "The first law of plumbing: shit flows downhill." That line probably pre-dates western civilization. It’s good to make a noobie kid laugh a little nervously. Agility doesn’t flow downhill. Agility doesn’t flow downhill, it perks up from below. In one sentence, this is because the bottom of the hill is where the people who directly make things make them, and agility is concerned most particularly with them, with

Agility Perks From Below See Full Post

The Technical Meaning Of Microtest

I write things called "microtests" to do my development. Doing this yields me greater success than I’ve had using any other technique in a 40-year career of geekery, so I advocate, wanting to share the technique far & wide. Before we can talk seriously about how or whether this works, we need a strong grasp of what a microtest is and does, from a strictly technical perspective, w/o all the trappings of the larger method and its attendant polemic. A

The Technical Meaning Of Microtest See Full Post

Success Theater, Corruption, and My Own Medicine

The more I work higher up the chain, the more I encounter folks who are openly seeking success theater, w/no interest or concern for actual value. This observation blinded me for many years. I have an odd-shaped-to-some but very strong sense of personal responsibility, myself, and I am no less prone to moralizing judgments than the next old testament prophet. My reactions varied, often enough based quite unfairly on the simple metric of how much I liked the person in

Success Theater, Corruption, and My Own Medicine See Full Post

How Long? (Technique Re-Mix)

How long (redux)? In the technical side of the modern synthesis, we develop code by writing and passing tests then re-working the code to make it as change-enabled as we can. The key "how long" aspect to this: how long does the code stay not working? That is, how long in between the times we could push the code straight to production? The desiderata in the modern synthesis is that we try to measure that number on a scale using

How Long? (Technique Re-Mix) See Full Post

Scroll to Top