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Blog PostsRSS
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Give yourself the gift of sanity this Christmas
Stop trying to “go agile”. No, really. I’ve watched companies for the better part of a decade try to introduce agile practices into their work, with relatively little success. Most commonly, they see limited localised improvements, create much more chaos than that, and some of their best people quit out of frustration. I have seen… Read more…
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Q: Why are you taking all these breaks? I never see you working!
You need me to be more responsive, but when I’m deep in a long-running task juggling a lot of little things in my head, it’s hard for me to surface for air, evaluate whether I need to respond to your request right now, then drop what I’m doing to help you. That’s why I’ve started training myself to take more frequent breaks.
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Lamentations on the last ten years of agile software development
I had intended to write an InfoQ article looking back at ten years of agile software development, but I never completed one. Instead, I found these notes, and I wanted to at least try to spark some conversation around the ideas. I would dearly love to learn about counterexamples and face dissenting view points. Don’t hold back.
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Get stuff out of your head… now!
Over the last few years I have felt a drastic and surprising improvement in how I feel about work. I can trace a lot of this benefit to one simple technique.
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Frenzied to Focused: Getting Started
Time and again I see clients struggling to complete work because they struggle to find enough contiguous time to complete a meaningful piece of work. I empathise, since I experienced this for the first time when I began to establish myself as a technical leader at IBM. As more people sought my advice, my time… Read more…
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A microtechnique for teaching refactoring
I plan to experiment with posting articles both here and at Google+. You’re reading my first such experiment, and I apologise if you’ve already read this mini-article on Google+ itself. Read the full article here.
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What’s the difference between a project and a goal? A more interesting example
If you want to “learn Clojure”, that sounds like a goal and like a project, so putting that into your Getting Things Done system as either a goal or a project might still feel confusing. In this brief article, I talk you through deciding how to handle this situation.
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What’s the difference between a project and a goal?
When I started applying the ideas from Getting Things Done, I felt confused in spots. What’s a project? What’s a goal? What makes them different? I share my working definitions of the terms, ones that have made the distinction crystal clear for me.
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Legacy Code. What, me worry?
You probably have quite a lot of disdain for legacy code, and generally I agree with you. Here, by legacy code, I mean code that we feel afraid to change. We wouldn’t need works like Michael Feathers’ Working Effectively with Legacy Code if we generally felt delight in working with legacy systems. We wouldn’t need… Read more…
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Ignore this article at your peril: you’ll miss a great learning opportunity!
Absolute, or universal, claims make for easy targets: a single counterexample causes them to tumble to the ground. Worse, when your interlocutor defends his claim in spite of your counterexample, then you likely end up in a meta-argument about logic that ends up far afield of the original point. It entertains, but it doesn’t inform. I have made this mistake several times in the past, so I plan to work on that, and I wanted to alert you to the possibility that you could benefit from working on it, too.
