Muses

Helping Your Downstream Collaborators

Change Harvesting, How I Work / / 6 minutes of reading

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

Change Harvesting, How I Work / / 5 minutes of reading

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

Programming, Change Harvesting, How I Work / / 7 minutes of reading

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

Change Harvesting, How I Work / / 5 minutes of reading

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

Coaching, Change Harvesting, How I Work / / 7 minutes of reading

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

How I Work, Change Harvesting, TDD, Programming / / 6 minutes of reading

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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Hitting on Speakers (Rant-y)

Programming, Change Harvesting / / 4 minutes of reading

I want to talk about this thing where you see someone on stage/screen presenting material about geekery, you decide you’re attracted, and you send them mail or dm hitting on them. You must not do this. It is rude, unprofessional, and hurtful to many people. Stop it. There are a lot of arguments that sound like they’re either neutral to or in favor of this behavior. They are wrong, in detail, in logic, and in toto. Let’s take a look.

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Microtest TDD: More Definition

TDD, Programming, How I Work / / 5 minutes of reading

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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Microtest TDD: The Big Picture

TDD, Programming, Refactoring, Change Harvesting, How I Work / / 4 minutes of reading

I think of my style of coding as "microtest TDD". That can be misleading for folks, so let’s take a walk over a few of the ideas, implicit and explicit, that make up the approach. First things first, bear the money premise in mind in all that follows, to wit: "I’m in this for the money." In the software trade, we make money by shipping more value faster. This is why I adopt these practices, because when I do them,

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The Jump to Microservices

Change Harvesting, Coaching / / 2 minutes of reading

More seriously, the first piece of advice I’d give a monolith-owner about converting to microservices would be to work very hard to factor their monolith well. Interestingly, across dozens of cases, I’ve never seen that advice taken. There’s always a well-dressed person with excellent powerpoint who is happy to give a compelling case for a technical solution to a problem that isn’t technical. If you can’t factor the monolith, you won’t be able to factor your microservices. All of the

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