Agile Complexification Inverter

Polish Poet and Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska on How Our Certitudes Keep Us Small and the Generative Power of Not-Knowing “Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’” By Maria Popova  - BrainPickings Purely for the fun of it, Maria Popova drew Wisława Szymborska’s poetic island in a map inspired by Thomas More’s Utopia. Polish poet Wisława Szymborska (July 2, 1923–February 1, 2012) "explored how our contracting compulsion for knowing can lead us astray in her sublime 1976 poem “Utopia,” found in her Map: Collected and Last Poems ( public library )" -- Maria Popova UTOPIA Island where all becomes clear. Solid ground beneath your feet. The only roads are those that offer access. Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs. The Tree of Valid Supposition grows here with branches disentangled since time immemorial. The Tree of Understanding, dazzlingly straight and simple, sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It. The t...

Big Data for Little Problems -OR- What happens when the customer has better data about the service than the provider and has better networking, better press coverage, better clout, better market reach and reputations? (Feb 23) My good looking wife just spent 2 hours trying to straighten out Frontier's billing machine... it's not easy.  The amazing thing I observed for my recliner while sipping an adult beverage was her influencing techniques.  Now another amazingly disconsernation ( not a word ) is that Frontier has some awesome support people.  But oh-my-god do they have a tough job.  It's the system that has failed.  And they have to figure out how to make some legacy piece-of-crap work. But it's not going to lead to happy satisfied customers (testify). Her father, Jim, moved into the home with us in December, he loves Western movies, and is an encyclopedia of knowledge better than IMDB.  So we called up Frontier (our FiOS provider for 6 years) ...

I hear lots of colleagues using the term 'technical debt' and the scenario that plays in my brain's cineplex is from The Princess Bride when Inigo Montoya remarks to Vizzini; "You keep using that word.  I don't think it means what you think it means." Inconceivable! So what does "Technical Debt" mean?  And what do my colleague's typically mean if it is not truly technical debt. The first is easy; the definition of Technical Debt: He who coins the term gets to define the term ( that's Ward Cunningham ). Ward Cunningham on Technical Debt Metaphor  OK, so to be truly technical debt one must negotiate the debt with the business.  The business should achieve some objective sooner and incur an obligation to repay the technical team the time and effort required to put the system back into a proper state of clean well factored code. But, wait... what could my colleagues mean when they misuse the term technical debt?  I think the...

Why do people schedule meetings and work-session into an arbitrary constraint of one hour blocks? Are we not capable of looking at the purpose and expected outcomes of the gathering and then estimating the appropriate duration needed to achieve the outcome? Do we not account for the cost and waste of having to reset context each time we meet and get to a partially finished state. It is the tyranny of the clock face, broken into one hour increments. The clock is just a human abstraction of time, an arbitrary measuring instrument. It is not a prescription for scheduling. I think we are misunderstanding the purpose of the clock. One doesn't drive a car by the speedometer. This obsession of one hour increments of work is ridiculous. I wonder where we learn it. Oh - yeah, school, where we learn many bad habits. See Also: HBR article Yes, You Can Make Meetings More Productive The Hummingbird Effect: How Galileo Invented Timekeeping and Forever Changed Modern Life by Maria...

If you haven't thought about the universe today - now would be a good time.  It may be the only time you really have.  However we tend to measure things, we humans tend to only think in terms of our personal scale.  We measure our lives in birthdays (an unassuming point where a crowded planet completes an almost circular orbit about a yellow star).  But what are the true delineating points in the history of the universe? One would most certainly have to be the Big Bang!  I mean - come-on, the point at which nothingness turns into somethingness - that's the start of something.  But measuring from that point 13.7 billion years ago, what's the next important event? 13.7 billion years ago:  Big Bang! Just 380,000 years later the atoms of Hyrdogen & Helium start to form. Just 200 million years later stars begin to form. These are just the first 3 Thresholds of Increasing Complexity (David Christian, Big History Project ).  They have happen...

If you've had beers with a few programmers, sometimes the conversation gets around to a one-ups-manship game of who's faced the worst bug.  One story I retold just the other day was about the IT department that was truncating long running connections at the firewall for security.  Silly programmers, we had written our applications to assume that a TCP/IP connection could last as long as the application needed it to last.  While it didn't take long to discover the bug, it did take weeks to clean it up - policy decision are the hardest to change.  Policy is not software - it is ink & paper signed in blood-ware.  Much harder that hardware.  Capable of withstanding krypton drills and sharks with frigin laser beams . Here's a picture of the first-ever computer bug. "One of the primary programmers for the Mark I was a woman, Grace Hopper . Hopper found the first computer "bug": a dead moth that had gotten into the Mark I and whose wings were blocking the...

I think the theme for today is Boundaries, Location and Navigation. I'm working for a mapping company, wonder if I need a vacation? A little distance from work could provide perspective.  Perhaps my reptilian-brain and monkey-brain are overtaking the Homo -brain, it happens when they are working out a deep problem. I noticed that Navteq was at CES - here's an excerpted twitter stream: Location is so much more than Navigation. Stop by and see us at booth #36062 and find out why. #CES @ NAVTEQ Location is so much more than Navigation. Stop by and see us at booth #36062 and find out why. #CES // Where's booth? need direct'n @ davidakoontz We're in the upper level South Hall next to Garmin_ Look forward to seeing you! @ NAVTEQ Location is so much more than Navigation. I was funnin ya ya gave a location but I need navigational aids - maybe its versa vise Now I happen to believe that there is more to location than coordinates.  But is Location so m...

What does a TODO tag in your code say about you as a developer? When is a TODO not appropriate - is it every appropriate to postpone work that you recognize, but just don't want to deal with now?  Is procrastination a trait that we encourage or discourage? I posit that quality code has very few if any TODO tags.  That there is a inverse correlation between the percentage of TODOs in a code base and the quality of the code. Srikaran Reddy had this argument to make: TODOs present in code may be indicative of the quintessential engineer: one who can distinguish between what is required at the moment versus an ideal, or potential future requirement, that is of relatively lower priority. The term 'sine qua non' comes to mind. This is especially true when maintaining inherited code. On the other hand, a TODO could represent some sloppiness. There are different flavors of TODOs that need to be factored into this argument. The good thing about TODOs is that they are eas...

Juliet:  What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet . Well you could look up Agile , then Complexification , then Inverter and concate the meaning - or - you could just say it's a blog trying to simplify Agile software development theory and practice. Along with other rants & ramblings I may have on the world at large. The name derives from a company I use to work for, where one of the developers noted that our software was a 'complexifier'. The term has sticking power with me; although its not a word in your store bought dictionary, you know what it means instantly.   So what's in a name...  many have asked this question... here's a great essay on naming from Grok Earth - Earthly Naming