2020/03/15 - The Moon is Implicit
Ides of March edition....
Happy Sunday, lovely humans.
Above is a photo I took at Pioneers Park (Lincoln, NE) a few weeks back. It was a lovely day for a walk. It’s still a lovely day for a socially-distanced walk.
Here’s what’s up for the past week, I guess.
I did some writing
One of the main topics of my work is empowering teams and companies to make bold choices, and particularly bold technical choices. It’s not that they have to make those choices, but a lot goes into creating a culture where such choices are possible (instead of being prevented by fear, incompetence, or unnecessary attachments).
The technical choice itself is pretty predictable, but required buy-in from a lot of teams, and required a lot of folks to be willing to change what they were doing for the good of the company and the codebase.
There are a lot of difficult technical challenges in software. I’ll freely concede this. However, with every single team I’ve been on (without exception), the human challenges have been greater than the technical challenges, even on teams that worked very well together. And even on teams where there were significant technical challenges, those challenges were often the result of crappy processes or choices made a long time ago where there’s not sufficient social/cultural capital to change them. Not always, but often.
I’ve got opinions.
(This is also a fun chance for me to show off my personal website, which I did some meaningful touch-ups on this past week).
Writing prompts? Writing prompts!
If you are a person who does any sort of creative writing (or creative output), or if you want to be, Rachel McKibbens writes the best prompts in the business.
Here’s the link mentioned in her bio: https://www.pinkdoorretreat.com/take-action
The Pink Door Retreat (which Rachel organizes) is also really cool.
My wife and I signed up to receive these prompts, as have a few other folks we know and love (and many we don’t yet know!).
A Thread About Dogs
This thread, by Blair Braverman, is worth reading (click on the tweet to see the whole thread:
It’s about two dogs who are siblings, and also perhaps some preconceived notions of ability.
Because we all need the people we love.
“Yeah, But Should We?”
I was at LoneStar Elixir a few weeks back, and this talk was one of my favorites. Impeccably sourced, powerfully told, and absolutely worth a listen. It examines systems of power and decision-making in a few notable companies (IBM, Boeing, ClearView), and how some pretty awful decisions were made.
“America is a Sham”
This article, by Dan Kios, explores some of the remarkably arbitrary rules and restrictions in place (no liquid containers over 4 ounces, no working from home, etc.) that have suddenly been thrown out in light of Coronavirus / COVID-19, revealing how non-essential those rules probably were.
All over America, the coronavirus is revealing, or at least reminding us, just how much of contemporary American life is bullshit, with power structures built on punishment and fear as opposed to our best interest. Whenever the government or a corporation benevolently withdraws some punitive threat because of the coronavirus, it’s a signal that there was never any good reason for that threat to exist in the first place.
I’m working on doing some more writing this week (hopefully in addition to the prompts Rachel McKibbens sends out, because I made a wise decision and subscribed).
Checklist-Driven Development - I gave a talk for the Boulder Ruby meetup this week on using checklists to formalize processes, and the importance of empowering anyone on a team to interrupt a process if it’s not going correctly. I’m going to turn that talk into a blog-post.
Evolving a High Throughput Data Pipeline - I gave a talk for the Omaha Ruby meetup this past week on handling large amounts of incoming (usually system-generated) data, and strategies we can use in our Ruby/Rails codebases to accommodate this. The strategies are platform-agnostic, but the specific implementations I talk about are in Ruby. This talk was described by at least one engineer in attendance as “a banger”, so I’m excited for it.
I’m also going to start a series of articles looking at what we know about learning and thinking and how we might apply those to software development. Software development requires learning a lot, and mapping business and technical concepts back and forth. By understanding more about how we learn, we might be able to make our work more pleasant.
I’ll also continue railing about children’s television:
Have a lovely week, everyone. Please wash your hands and socially-distance yourselves responsibly.
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