Podcasts

Slowing Decisions Down

This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series Leading Technical Change

Here’s another technique card from my seminar, “Leading Technical Change”. We first get into midwifing change precisely because we want it to be smoother, easier, and faster. But sometimes, a coach needs not to rush a decision through, but to slow it down. It’s so exciting when our proposed change starts to catch fire, especially when major influencers in our team suddenly “get it”, and want the whole team doing it. “Winning.” And it is winning. But when you start […]

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What About Failure?

This entry is part 4 of 5 in the series Leading Technical Change

If we’re going to enable and support change, we’re going to fail, more often than we succeed, and we want to bake that idea in, early on, lest we fail both more often, and potentially more disastrously. Here’s some thoughts around this NOT DEPRESSING topic. 🙂 The weirdest thing about all this: it’s actually rather hard to tell when you’ve failed vs succeeded, working as midwife to change. I’ve had what I thought were successes backfire horribly, inadvertently leading teams

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Can We Be Honest?

This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series Leading Technical Change

Can we be honest? If we’re going to be successful change midwives, honesty is very important. In this technique card from Leading Technical Change, I talk about some of the ins & outs of this complicated topic. The first point is urgent: Being honest means believing everything you say, not saying everything you believe. Honesty is really important, but people quite often over-share in the name of pursuing honesty. Every healthy person, for instance, has moments of extreme negativity. Our

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Slash the Load

This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series Leading Technical Change

The people who hire me ask me to help their teams make changes. Most of the time, my first step is to see how I can slash those teams’ load. Here’s a technique card from my seminar, “Leading Technical Change” Raw text of a technique card: Wait, what? First thing I do To me, this is dreadfully obvious, but for a lot of folks seeking change, it comes as a completely shocking idea. The weirdest part, though, is that it

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Detail: Series Intro

Detail: The thing that strikes me over and over again, in my own work style, in my Friday group’s analytics, in Ron’s long-running Kotlin and short-running Gilded Rose series, is how much attention high-skill geeks pay to some of the smallest details in the code. An example. I was doing Gilded Rose the other day, first time in years, and we start with the ugly method, which we’re asked to add a feature to, following certain constraint rules to make

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Joy Project: FGNO Plotter

Joy project: Today’s a comparatively light work day, so I’m gonna lay out what I’m actually trying to do with this project. The source, btw, is at: GitHub – GeePawHill/fgno-plotter Playtime project for the fgno meetup. Contribute to GeePawHill/fgno-plotter development by creating an account on GitHub. Feel free to poke around. There are a bunch of simultaneous missions going on with fgno-plotter, which is why it’s a joy and learning project. "fgno", btw, is an abbreviation of "Friday Geek’s Night

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TDD Pro-Tip: Against Automated Macrotests

TDD Pro-Tip: I advocate against automated macro-tests — those whose base is entire running programs –, as their cost is high and their benefit is doubtful. I very rarely write them. There is a bewildering variety of terminology out there around what I’m calling macro-tests, so let’s poke around a little. The central idea of "macro-test" is that we write code that launches an entire subject program and probes its behavior "from the outside". There are often multiple programs in

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Some TDD History

I spoze the historic and ongoing inability/unwillingness of the software trade to grasp and adopt test-driven development (TDD) is one of the most frustrating & demoralizing events of my forty-two years as a professional geek. I believe there are several related factors in play, ranging in abstraction level from pressures of global ieconmics to mistakes in local human interaction. Studying this large-scale failure, even while having some small-scale successes, underlies much of my work on change. Because, while the overall

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On Over-Coding

Let’s talk for a minute about "over-coding". Over-coding, when you’re a TDD’ist, is writing more code than you (intended to) have test to cover. But I will offer a few thoughts on this to non TDD’ers and TDD’ers alike. Many people, pro-TDD and con- both, seem to think of TDD as the name for a collection or rigorous mechanical rules. TDD is a kind of jack-in-the-box, where you sit there and turn the handle, circle circle circle, and out pops

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Ten I-Statements About Change

This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series Leading Technical Change

Here’s ten I-Statements about change, in the geek trades, and beyond. My hope is that it will give you a richer sense of where I’m coming from in my blogs, talks, videos, and courses. Before we begin, though these statements are about the geek trades, I am actually far more concerned with change in the world. We can change this. We’re the only thing that possibly can. Stay safe, stay strong, stay angry, stay kind. Black Lives Matter. A little

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