Podcasts

Readability And Scannability

TDD, Programming, Change Harvesting / / 6 minutes of reading

I distinguish quite strongly between “readability” and what I call “scannability”. I think that our trade’s pedagogues, even our very good ones, conflate the two, and in so doing inaccurately describe programming and ineffectively prescribe remedies. Maybe the way to approach the idea is through your experience of seeing. Humans — most vertebrates, in fact — rely heavily on "seeing". The fabric of our experience is richly visual. A large portion of our neocortex is given over to it. Its […]

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My Direction Forward

Coaching, Change Harvesting / / 4 minutes of reading

Here’s a thing that happens: "We tried your advice by not trying your advice except partly where we did what we want but gave it your labels and it didn’t work and therefore you are wrong." Now, if you’ve given that advice for many years, and followed it in your own endeavors, and you, your teams, and many others have succeeded with it, what are you to make of such a statement? Well. Let’s not hedge, the world has too

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Kontentment And Human Arcs

Kontentment, TDD, Programming / / 7 minutes of reading

Aight. I been away from programming for a couple of months, but there was a reason I started talking the other day about the kontentment project: I’m wanting mucho change in it. For a talk I’m giving, I want the ability to draw human arcs, with the same ease with which I can draw human lines. So I set out today to get that in. Human straight lines start with a line segment AB. Pick two random locations on that

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Frames in the Software Trade: An Example

Change Harvesting / / 5 minutes of reading

We’ve talked about frames adding up to worldviews adding up to cultures, but it all feels pretty vague in its possible importance. We need some informal sense of how this works in practice. In the immortal words of Brian Marick, "an example would be handy right about now." Continuous Integration (CI) is the practice of frequently cycling code through the source vault. People practicing CI do this several times a day. In "git" terms, they both pull/merge/push, depending on language

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The Kontentment Project

Kontentment, Change Harvesting, Programming / / 5 minutes of reading

I am in a mood of 1) wanting to geek out a little, and 2) wanting to concretize some key ideas from change-harvesting for my fellow geeks. To do that, I need to give you a sketch of the kontentment project, a desktop app I wrote and use in making videos. The source for kontentment is here: Kontentment – GeePawHill on GitHub I don’t particularly recommend you download it or try to run it. You won’t need to for these

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How I Work (Test-Driving Mix)

Programming / / 8 minutes of reading

A while back, I wrote a muse about how I work focused just on the coding I do. Today I want to talk about how I test during that process. How I Work – Just Programming Mix | GeePawHill.org The same caveat applies as before: This is not intended as prescription. I am happy, believe me, to tell you what to do. But that’s not what this is. This is just what I do.  Meta: I don’t separate testing from

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Discipline: A Short Rant

Technique / / 2 minutes of reading

People use the word "discipline" reasonably often when they talk about the software trade. I tend to avoid that word, and I wish more folks followed me in that policy. Most of those folks are not meaning anything untoward. They might easily use "orderly", "consistent", "persistent", "systematic", and so on, instead of "discipline", and as I say, I wish they would. "Discipline", in other parts of the forest, is an ordinary part of the vocabulary of extrinsic motivation by punishment

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Programming Interviews For Dummies

Programming / / 5 minutes of reading

Programming Interviews For Dummies. I know it’s a horrible world out there, and there’s so much more bad than this. Still, it saddens me, on several vectors at once. Okay, well, I’ve had four people ask me about this, and I happen to have this soapbox sitting right here, so what the hell. Before anything else, there’s the series titles, and I’m going to make a joke: I always wanted to write "Low Self-Esteem For Dummies!" and see how many

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Frames: Build, Race, and More

Change Harvesting / / 8 minutes of reading

Well, Change-Harvesters, I want so badly to connect up the dots from these previous muses about the topic and tie them back to the concrete realities of professional software development. But I can’t. Yet. I can’t yet. We have just a little further to go. When we talked about "if all you have is a hammer", we mentioned frames, and I mentioned Race, Build, and More, but then we kept right on going. I want to circle back now, because

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Change-Harvesting: The How

Change Harvesting, Change / / 6 minutes of reading

The central concept of a dynamic unity is change-harvesting: make a change, harvest its value, use that value to make another change, over and over, change after change, world without end. We spoke the other day about how tools shape problems. "If all you have is a hammer, all you will see are nails." It was a conversation about mental tools: frames, worldviews, culture. My contention is that our trade’s standard frames, worldviews, and culture are failing us, and that

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