Lately I’ve been working in Node, and that means I have access to all the open-source modules on npm. It is easy to add a dependency on any of them. But is it a good idea? Not every library is production-grade. Not every library (or service) is something that I want my production code to depend … Read moreWhat makes a dependency dependable?
(This is a shorter version of my talk for DeliveryConf, January 2020. Video of slides+audio; Slides as pdf) Good software is still alive. The other day, I asked my twelve year old daughter for recommendations of drawing programs. She told me about one (FireAlpaca?) “It’s free, and it updates pretty often.” She contrasted that with … Read moreTaking care of code … more and more code
Most software gets harder to change as it ages. Making modern applications, it is not enough to write a system and put it out there. We need continual improvement and adaptation to the growing world. How can we develop and operate increasingly useful software? To answer this, I need a mental model of how software … Read moreHow can we develop and operate increasingly useful software?
(originally titled: “On the Origins of Opera and the Future of Programming”) Blog write-up Abstract There’s a story to tell, about musicians, artists, philosophers, scientists, and then programmers. There’s a truth inside it that leads to a new view of work, that sees beauty in the painful complexity that is software development. Starting from The … Read moreKeynote: Collective Problem Solving in Music, Science, Art, and Software
businesses… need a new worldview… that shifts the emphasis… from success as accomplishment to success as learning. Jeff Sussna, in Designing Delivery “Success as learning” doesn’t mean learning lessons. This is not learning as facts. This is learning as becoming. It is learning that bakes into who we are and how we do things, bakes … Read moreLearning as becoming
Some people work in a system, and some people work on a system. Like, you can be the person who washes the dishes, or the person who installs and maintains the dishwasher. You can be the person who assembles the reports every week, or the person who automates that report assembly. (Jacob Stoebel told this … Read moreDevelopers are system changers
Generativity is about caring about what comes after you. In a social context, it’s when old people care about subsequent generations, instead of maximizing their own happiness for the last few years. In business, it’s when executives care about the health and outcomes of the whole executive team, instead of their own career after this … Read moreGenerativity
again: Every action has two results: a set of side effects on the world, and the next version of ourselves. Sometimes in the creation of an artifact, the artifact itself is less important than the process of creating it. Wardley Maps are like that too – it’s about the thought that goes into creating them, … Read moreThe artifact and the process
Every action has two results: a set of side effects on the world, and the next version of ourselves. I learned this from Erlang, a purely functional yet stateful programming language. Erlang uses actor-based concurrency. The language is fully immutable, yet the programs are not: every time an actor receives a message, it can send … Read moreEvery action has two results (Erlang edition)
“Ideas don’t spring fully formed from the mind of an individual. Ideas emerge between people.” Avdi Grimm, in his closing keynote at Southeast Ruby, told how when he sets out to write a talk, he wants to go out on his deck and walk back and forth until he squeezes the ideas out of his … Read moreAn old idea in a new context is new.