You don’t know what you’ve got until you get it

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

While I was on holiday, Marc started creating a new product from scratch. He’d been walking around with a problem he wanted to solve and couldn’t find anything that he liked. Marc also wanted to try out the Scala programming language, to see if it would be worth using, and thought nothing helps you focus more than building an actual product.

I didn’t get it. But I gave Marc a hand anyway, because we had previously decided that QWAN values:

supporting someone who has a passion over discussing the business case at length

Variazione in scala di grigiVariazione in scala di grigi by Eric Perrone

Why didn’t I get it?

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Bottom Up Systems Thinking

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

Jurgen Appelo writes in Communication = Information * Relationships that “top-down systems thinking is a management fad“. I agree. Systems thinking works only if it happens in all directions at once. It seems to work when a group of people is doing systems thinking  in the same room at the same time. All combined, these people bring the perspectives that are necessary to come up with changes that work. (more…)

Don’t Stop Thinking about Naming

Monday, March 9th, 2009

Steve Freeman did a great writeup of the session Marc Evers and I hosted at the Software Craftsmanship Conference: Mock Roles not Objects, live and in person.

What can I add besides a big thank you, especially since Steve asked for feedback before posting and incorporated a comment about my habitual way of going about naming – creating a bit more code on an empty system and then go mad about naming after I have something more to generalize on.

A few things:

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Responsibility Driven Design at Software Craftsmanship Conference

Wednesday, January 7th, 2009

Marc and I just got word from Jason Gorman, that our session Responsibility Driven Design with Mock Objects has been accepted for the conference that has outlawed index cards, post-its and lego: the Software Craftsmanship Conference in London, February 26.

The year is getting off to a good start – we did an iteration on the session proposal January 1st. To fit with the spirit of the conference, we’ve added a coders’ dojo to it. I look forward to going back to the BBC site, having facilitated in-house dojos before.

I’m still wondering what happened with our other proposal – the continuous integration install party. It might not have gotten through, but I guess we could run it as a BoF (possibly at the SPA conference in April, also in london).