Category: General

It’s Friday afternoon. Team Plaidpants is finishing up their sprint, but trying to understand why they struggled so much to complete their stories. “It really seemed like we had the stars aligned this time, ” said Yvonne, “but somehow those two bugs got in the way. And I have no idea why this story took…

Early in my career, I worked at a startup where I learned a phrase that has helped drive me to understanding faster in more situations than I can count. The developer (I guess he would be considered a DevOps guy now) was named Dave and I came to him with a question one time. I…

Success. If one were to look at the key elements to success across teams, organizations, groups, even ourselves, one element would be common – a vision of where we are, and where we want to go. Some can be short and sweet, like Amazon’s Vision Statement: Our vision is to be earth’s most customer centric…

Meet Jill. Jill just wants to be able to get to work. But every day, she faces a giant traffic jam. She does her best to avoid it however she can – leaving early, leaving later, trying alternative routes – but every day she struggles to make it to work on time. Jill’s boss, Sarah,…

A couple of weeks ago, Angela Harms posted the following Tweet: Friend wants to help his CEO understand why XP will give better results. What links or articles would you suggest? — Angela Harms (@angelaharms) January 16, 2014 For those of you not familiar with the concept of Extreme Programming it is one of the…

Thanks to the awesome organizers at GOTO Conf Berlin! I had a great time with some great speakers and attendees. Here are my slides for my talk on Learning to Listen to Your Code. I also talked about a couple of books: Alexander’s A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction and The Timeless Way of Building….

Tampabay.com has begun offering a digital subscription for some users of the site. Readers will be allowed to access 15 pages a month for free, but will be asked to subscribe if they use more. While the homepage, several areas within the site and a select number of stories will remain free, others will be…

This week I was being interviewed for some of my upcoming talks, when the interviewer asked about limiting our use of design patterns in code, linking specificially to this post by Jim Bird, where part of his post says: Don’t use patterns unless you need to My response is simple: You can’t not use patterns….

In my office I have a picture of Step 1 of a Lego build. I don’t actually remember what it was to, but it fascinated me in its simplicity. Because no matter how hard of a Lego model you are going to build, you have to start with a single piece, and connect another piece…

This morning I watched a great video by Bret Victor about the future of programming, told from the perspective of a computer scientist in 1973. One thing that really stuck with me was this line: The most dangerous thought you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you are doing…