“Advertising is social psychology. To understand how advertising affects people, you have to understand why people follow the group and how the brain works.” – Ad Savvy on Philip Zimbardo, whose talk at TED explains how ordinary people can become monsters.
TED: Philip Zimbardo: How ordinary people become monsters … or heroes
Steve Yegge talks about Google’s development (circa 2006) process – a process that is focused on being agile – and riffs on just how bad “Bad Agile” can be: Good Agile, Bad Agile:
Bad Agile hurts teams in several ways.
First, Bad Agile focuses on dates in the worst possible way: short cycles, quick deliverables, frequent estimates and re-estimates. The cycles can be anywhere from a month (which is probably tolerable) down to a day in the worst cases. It’s a nicely idealistic view of the world.
In the real world, every single participant on a project is, as it turns out, a human being. We have up days and down days. Some days you have so much energy you feel you could code for 18 hours straight. Some days you have a ton of energy, but you just don’t feel like focusing on coding. Some days you’re just exhausted. Everyone has a biological clock and a a biorhythm that they have very little control over, and it’s likely to be phase-shifted from the team clock, if the team clock is ticking in days or half-weeks.
Not to mention your personal clock: the events happening outside your work life that occasionally demand your attention during work hours.
None of that matters in Bad Agile. If you’re feeling up the day after a big deliverable, you’re not going to code like crazy; you’re going to pace yourself because you need to make sure you have reserve energy for the next big sprint. This impedance mismatch drives great engineers to mediocrity.
There’s also your extracurricular clock: the set of things you want to accomplish in addition to your main project: often important cleanups or other things that will ultimately improve your whole team’s productivity. Bad Agile is exceptionally bad at handling this, and usually winds up reserving large blocks of time after big milestones for everyone to catch up on their side-project time, whether they’re feeling creative or not. Bad Agile folks keep their eye on the goal, which hurts innovation. Sure, they’ll reserve time for everyone to clean up their own code base, but they’re not going to be so altruistic as to help anyone else in the company. How can you, when you’re effectively operating in a permanent day-for-day slip?
Bad Agile seems for some reason to be embraced by early risers. I think there’s some mystical relationship between the personality traits of “wakes up before dawn”, “likes static typing but not type inference”, “is organized to the point of being anal”, “likes team meetings”, and “likes Bad Agile”. I’m not quite sure what it is, but I see it a lot.
Read the whole thing.
The last two nights Emma has slept soundly in her new toddler bed. Emma had moved fast transitioning from a bassinet to a crib and from our room to her own nursery. We moved a bit slower in moving her to her own bed. It required us to trust ourselves (is the house as child safe as it can be?), and her (how she will handle waking up in the middle of the night with all that freedom?), in a poignant way.
The last few weeks her nursery has been transforming into her room. With a door she can open and close at will. A place she can have alone time when she wants (we are big advocates of un-structured play – we’re not so called propeller-parents – we shoot for some kind of balance). The neat thing about all this – now – more than ever – you can see her determination, curiosity, drive, joy, and sense of humor all self directed. When we’re playing, or when I’m showing her something new, or reading with her, watching her with her grandparents, Aunt Rose, Uncle Mike, or her Mommy, or just watching her do her own thing, I can think to myself, “wow – not only do I love her – I like her”. She’s clever. And her sense of humor just tickles you. It makes my heart feel good.
Emma’s first night in a toddler bed, her first not sleeping in a crib.
YouTube: Toddler Leads the Celebration:
What a fantastic day that was. I need to post those pictures (and maybe vids) of Emma, Richelle and me soon.
Scott McNulty, Philly blogger, food blogger, Apple tech blogger, longtime (now former) organizer of the Philly Blogger meetup, longtime contributor to Philly Future, and good friend, has had a book published on WordPress and blogging best practices.
Buy it here at Amazon.com.
Howard Hall, likewise a long time contributor to Philly Future, friend, writer and poet, had a book of poetry published.
Get it here at Amazon.com.
(I feel like building a widget to highlight Howard Hall haikus – hmmmm… )
It’s a long story, but I’ve decided it’s time for me to head back to school for something other than a certificate.
I had begun this journey back in 2004, but got hit with … life .. that pulled my priorities elsewhere: Emma, the Norgs Un-conference, the breaking up of my band, my mom’s illness and passing, the terrible back and leg pain I was experiencing (long story – there is great progress here), and the rebuilding of Comcast.net, of which I as a major part in developing its architecture.
Now, passing beyond the needed crisis-of-the-moment handling of that time, I can refocus on what I want to – my family, my work (both of which cross section with my hobbies and passions – I am blessed). My education is in support of these. Hopefully will be posting regular updates as to the process.
WashingtonPost: Bytes of Life: For Every Move, Mood and Bodily Function, There’s a Web Site to Help You Keep Track
Jeff Jarvis: The perils of publicness
The Atlantic: He Saw It Coming: The forgotten filmmaker who anticipated our modern media madness:
…the world his early films anticipated is the world we inhabit now. Like no filmmaker before or since, Watkins captures the constant manipulation and countermanipulation of the modern media, the push-pull of image projection and message management that has blurred the line between news and propaganda. His films are testaments to central truths of the current media environment: that mere logic is powerless against a brilliant projection of personality, that self-conscious “objectivity” and truth-telling are very different things, and that compelling narrative is impervious to facts. From the selling of the Iraq War to the selling of Sarah Palin, Watkins, like Orwell before him, shows how we are lied to, and how we lie to ourselves.
Furious Seasons: FDA Panel Slams Antipsychotic Use In Kids, Teens
NYTimes: What Has Driven Women Out of Computer Science?:
At least we know one thing: it’s possible to have about the same number of men and women in computer science classes. That just about describes classrooms of 25 years ago.
Malcom Gladwell’s new book is getting trashed by some rather big name bloggers. Me thinks they doth protest too much because – for once – one of his books runs counter to Web’s domineering libertarian culture. If you’ve read “Blink”, read “Tipping Point” – what I consider a far better book and more applicable to the Web. His new one, named “Outliers” looks like a must read.
To Watch: “Strive For Happiness” – a documentary about sensitive subject matter – what the lives are like for those in families with loved ones dealing with mental illness.
A question to think about – will Britney Spears’s struggle with mental illness make it easier to talk about it?
codeartisan: Jon Moore: Cracking down on technical debt:
Generally, as the folks with the technical ability to recognize it, it is the development team’s responsibility to try to avoid accruing technical debt while producing product. Failing that, it is their responsibility to recognize/document existing debt and to advocate for its removal. However, note that there are often symptoms of technical debt, such as those I’ve listed above for architectural debt, that can be recognized by non-technical folks too.
On the flip side, business folks / product owners need to be able to trade off short term wins that accrue technical debt vs. taking longer to produce a product with less debt. Communication with the tech team is of vital importance here; undoubtedly there will be times when a short-term win will be important (especially with a first-to-market situation), but it needs to be accompanied by a plan to eliminate the accrued debt. i.e. Treat your technical debt like credit card debt that should be paid down ASAP, and not as a long-term mortgage.
The interest on your technical debt is probably not tax-deductible.
Very much related to my earlier post about Agile gone wrong.
Sip from the Firehose: Michael Davis: Memories of Turbo Pascal version 1.0:
At the time, I was an 18 year old high school dropout that had recently been incarcerated in the Lebanon Correctional Institute outside of Cincinnati, OH. The one saving grace of this facility was that the Quaker originated Wilmington College had a branch located within the walls of the prison.
Facing the possibility of a long sentence, I made probably the best decision of my life to that point. That decision was to get my GED and quickly get enrolled in college. It only took a few days of incarceration to realize that something in my life needed to change and getting an education seemed to be the best way to do it. In addition to the Burroughs B1990 system, there was a lab of several Apple II computers that were capable of running Turbo Pascal. After taking the prerequisite courses, my introduction to computer programming was Turbo Pascal.