When I Need to Not Pair

So, a friend asked me to say more about "not pairing". As so often, it triggered me to muse. Sometimes I need to not pair. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love pairing. I love it for three reasons. It makes me a better geek. That is, I learn from pairing. Pairing makes two geeks more productive than if they solo’d. That is a pair writes mo’ better code than two solos. PAIRING IS AWESOMELY MORE FUN. But there are […]

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Done With “Technical Debt”

I am done with "technical debt" as a useful concept. As so often happens, an appealing idea happened, one with useful connections to the concrete, and we took it and ran with it. Unfortunately, that idea has more appeal than it does decision-making value. Folks justify the most ridiculous nonsense and put it under the heading of "technical debt". In particular, they write shitty code, I mean terrible code. They do this in the name of productivity. The claim is

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Optimize Collaboration, Not Meetings

There’s a lot of internet out there about meetings. Sturgeon’s law applies here. There’s some good advice, tho, too. Where I come from’s different. What I see, as with so many other topics, is how hard we try to fix problems our assumptions created. There are a lot different ends to which folks want to apply meetings as means. Three common ends are the "orders meeting", the "report meeting", and the "decision meeting". In an orders meeting, we’re there so

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On Pedagogy In The Geek Trades

I find 4 major failings in both how & what we teach in geekery. We mostly don’t. That is, actual teaching of actual geekery-for-a-living is almost non-existent. We suffer in attitude & content & structure from the trivially flawed “information transfer” view of what teaching & learning is. We purport to more knowledge than we actually have, teaching crude guesses as if they were writ, and aphorisms as if they were Euclid. We withdraw the field, abrogating our responsibility and

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Reversible Raincoat Tests

Let’s review "reversible raincoat tests." Sometimes, we build systems in which a downstream collaborator must interface with an upstream one. The two apps are by separate teams, on separate servers, developed at separate times, and still both in development. A reversible raincoat test is a script with two sides. Think in terms of a literal script, like in a play. "Mike: hi mom. Mom: hi son. Mike: is today tuesday? Mom: no, doofus, it’s thursday. Mom: gotta go, basement is

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On One Ring To Rule Them All?

Yesterday I mused about explanation privileging, where one always reaches for one ring to rule them all in their explanations of behavior. This morning I am thinking about the reasons that happens. Don’t be alarmed, i’m not gonna suggest there’s just one reason for it every time it happens, i’m circular, every argument is circular, true enough, but i’m not that circular. It takes more than one step. 🙂 one reason it happens is biology. There are huge biological reasons

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Choosing A Coaching Story To Work

Still feeling it, so, a sidebar on choosing which coaching stories to work… I was raised in XP, and as such, I imbibed the concept of "most important story" heavily. When I’d show up at these shops, I’d be replete with the wonder of myself, and I’d look out on the horizon of broken things, and I’d pick. And I picked "the most important story". To me, that meant the thing that is most ruining their ability to ship. But

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Why Do We Seek One Ring To Rule Them All?

I’m thinking of this thing called "justifcation privileging," or alternatively "explanation monism". Or even, short hand and jokily, "one ring to rule them all." One constantly sees tweets, blogs, even books, where someone boils down staggeringly complex and ill-understood processes to one factor. Today I saw "people don’t make decisions rationally, they make them emotionally." Now, set aside for the moment that no one even knows what those words mean other than at some vague gut-check level, even then, it’s

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The First Coaching Days

I can’t over-emphasize for new coaches the importance of rampant opportunism. Until you’ve established your miracle powers in a team, you won’t be able to move big levers, only small ones. Which small levers will bring you the biggest bang of trust & faith the fastest? Some possible openings: we find a bug that’s an exemplar of a family of bugs, and we refactor so it never can occur again. Or we have an untestable, if they’ve started TDD’ing, and

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Shifting Certainties

Shifting certainties. This is where i’m headed these days. Without belaboring criticism, what i’m seeing is that we have a trade with a whole stack of roles and humans to fill them, and, of necessity, they have assembled a varied, sometimes compatible sometimes not, set of certainties by which they navigate. The trouble is that, even when the certainties align with one another, they, ummm, aren’t. That is, they aren’t certainties at all. Neither our data nor our experience actually

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