Muses

Big Batch Releases

Big-batch releases, coordinated and controlled by a central intelligence, fail, and fail frequently. Several aspects of this are fascinating, because of the interplay of hard mathematical reality with human frailty. Let’s take a swing. It’s Sunday muse-day, comfort food for the geekery-inclined. Enjoy, take respite, but don’t forget we want to change a lot more than just code. Black Lives Matter. Stay safe, stay strong, stay angry, stay kind. We can characterize releases by the number of stories in them. […]

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Sharing Configurations

You can put all your configuration in a shared library and eliminate just about every mis-configuration in your multi-process application. It’s not free, but it’s cheap, and it kills a lot of minor pain. Let’s take a gander. It’s Sunday geek comfort-food time. I hope you enjoy it, and I also hope you remember it’s not the most important story out there. Please keep working for change, once you’re rested. Stay safe, stay strong, stay kind, stay angry. Black Lives

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Re-Orienting Around Backsteps

When large teams struggle with trunk-based development (TBD) or continuous integration/deployment (CI/CD), a good strategy is to re-orient how the teams face "backsteps", moments in our workflow where a discovery forces us to re-open a stage we thought was closed. It’s been a hard stretch for those of us seeking peace and equity. I offer this geekery not to suggest it matters as much as that does, but only to give us a little respite. Stay safe, stay strong, stay

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On Agile Methods

A couple of days back, I tweeted about SAFe. It created some stir on the timeline, which was great, as I got to see a lot of perspectives. I want to use that tweet as an excuse to talk about something much larger. This will be a long one. 🙂 Meanwhile, I remind you, geekery’s not as important right now as some other things. Please, stay safe, stay strong, stay angry, stay kind. Black Lives Matter. We are the only

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Standup Braindump

The standup is a short recurring meeting used to (re-)focus the team-mind on effectively moving stories through our workflow. Here’s my recommended approach to having standups be useful and brief. The general sequence is 1) address team-wide emergency issues, 2) work story-by-story, 3) distribute new work, 4) address team-wide non-emergency issues. Note that, quite often, there is no part 1, and no part 4. Sometimes there’s not even a part 3. Some general tips, then. 1) Don’t over-engineer standups. Stay

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The UI Monolith Making App

The ultimate making app for a shipping multi-service system is actually a one-machine monolith with a UI. If your team is experiencing the most common pains from working in a large SOA environment, the productivity payback will be enormous. It’s important for me to take a second to remind you that there’s much more to this world than geekery. Please keep working for change all around you, including, especially, outside the monitor. Stay safe, stay strong, stay angry, stay kind.

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Rice & Garlic & More Smaller Steps

My rice’n’garlic advice, "take many more much smaller steps," can be said another way: reject any proposed path that requires a step size larger than the limit you’ve set for that particular domain of activity. Time for Sunday geek comfort. It’s meant to be respite. There are more important things than geekery, so please remember to think outside the monitor. Stay strong, stay safe, stay angry, stay kind. Black Lives Matter. "Rice’n’garlic advice" is blind advice, for when people ask

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A Making-App UI

Once armed with the idea of a shipping app and a making app, a whole range of possibilities open up. Among the most powerful: give your making app a UI just for making. It’s Sunday, which is geek comfort food day for me. Remember, tho, to think and feel and work outside the monitor. Please help me in opposing the multiple ongoing efforts to suppress the votes of millions of American citizens. Black Lives Matter. A "making app" is when

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Scenario Builders

In a data-rich environment, we can use the Builder concept to make DSL’s for our Making application. This often makes testing the hard business core of our code both faster and easier. Folks, I love sharing my geekery with you. For me, it brings much comfort. I hope, tho, you’ll join me in working for change that isn’t just about code, but about the larger world. Black Lives Matter. We’ve spoken in the past about using our codebase to do

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Humans & Mistakes

Approaches in software development — or anything else — that don’t take ordinary human failings as their starting point are prone to dramatic failure. "The Impossible Human" is, well, noticeably uncommon. Let’s dig in on that. More geek joy comfort food from me today, but please think & work outside the monitor by enabling and encouraging change in our wider world. Black Lives Matter. Some years back, I made content for a CMS that had a whole lot of overlapping

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