If product or business folks get to have a say in how to do the feature, what shortcuts/hacks to take, or put a pressure on delivery it also makes a lot of sense to have them in the on-call rotation to experience the outcomes of their influence and decisions, right?

Wait time variance goes up as the size of PR increases. The bigger the PR, the more uncertain when it's going to be merged. What does that mean? If you want higher predictability, you need smaller batches. Period.

"Rob Pike Reinvented Monads" that's about right... www.innoq.com/en/blog/2016...

Haha, no.

In terms of resiliency, it doesn't matter that the internet is distributed if there's monopoly on top of that.

Should be called Cloudflared

"How do you like them economies of scale?!" Laughing in lack of resiliency.

For capitalism to keep operating it has to convince you that you are thing that ends at the boundaries of your body rather than a flow connected to uncountable others. After all, you can't really profit off extracting from yourself.

As long as LLMs punish you for making smaller steps with higher cost per batch of changes, we'll mostly see more time spent in planning and big batches of changes being dumped - which, of course, has production implications.

Scott Galloway a decade ago: "In the 60s our brightest minds put us on the Moon, now they're in Silicon Valley trying to optimize ad visibility to get you to maybe buy a car you have no interest in." And we don't think about this as often as we should.

"I know, I know! In an ideal world, we'd invest more time in design, but we need to be less dogmatic and more pragmatic!"

🍩 economy instead of "numbers go up" www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rhcr...

If you set out to reduce accidental complexity, but then overreach and start trying to reduce essential complexity without realizing it, you're in for a ride. Oversimplifying complex reality and just-ism ("let's not complicate, it's just this") to something that it's not will be very painful.

Smaller changes that we get with refactoring (original meaning of the term) and incremental/emergent design, also help with moving faster as a group, because it's way easier to agree on a smaller step forward than a bigger step forward. 1/2

There's a huge difference between optimizing for making bigger changes faster and optimizing for making smaller changes more frequently. Lean towards the latter, even though most of the industry is trying very hard to find ways to do the former.

Mamdani: "We can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves. After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him."

Nobody ever got promoted for solving an exponential problem in its lag (still slow growth) phase.

The problem with any economies of scale is that the immediate cost savings they provide obscure the costs of a lack of local resiliency, which are observed only later. And it's far from guaranteed that the latter won't be higher than the former.

It's amusing to observe the sheer amount of "Not Invented Here Syndrome" present in "BigTech" companies by the extent of different language used for already ubiquitous terms and ideas in the industry.

If you can't change design cheaply because refactoring skills are lacking, you're less likely to end up with a suitable design for a given problem that emerges from insights you get as a byproduct of refactoring. 1/2

Reminder: the Call for Sessions for next year's Agile Manchester conference in May is currently open: agilemanchester.net/call-for-ses... / @agilemanc.bsky.social #agilemanc

True! plush.city/@JellyTBeagl...

One important questions to ask is: "What amount of domain insights are you missing out on by handing off creating the changes to the machine?". Can you quantify that? :) Way more difficult, if not impossible, compared to "saved X hours creating this feature using AI". 1/2

fuck yeah

I often ask myself if a technology, beside lowering the costs for which lowering the costs is beneficial, is also lowering the costs for which lowering the costs is detrimental. 1/4

What are the costs and implications of a fragmented mental model of a domain across the team that you get as a result of people working in isolation?

The only way to protect your future is by taxing the billionaires more. At the @makethempay.bsky.social rally today.

The tyranny of economic growth obsession.

As American farmers would say, Trump is making Brazil great again. 🍿

"When you hear an Anarcho-capitalist or Libertarian or Neoliberal speak of freedom, know that they are not talking about your individual freedoms. They are talking about the freedom of capital to exploit and corrupt, and making your government a servant of the capitalists and not you the citizens."

When I am elected, I will read the code DOGE wrote. I will find out how they stole your data and what they have done with it. And then I will tell you

It's amazing how much teams and companies can achieve when they have wrong goals set.

If I had a € for every set of command + handler + response classes that should've been just a method in an existing application service...

I literally had a conversation with one of the managers I work with where I asked him point blank: “if I brought you results that changed every time you looked at them, how would you feel about that?” He said he wouldn’t trust them. Then I asked him why he was trusting ChatGPT results.

Tests tell us our software can work. Observability tells us our software IS working.

It’s been a long time coming, but what XP ultimately taught me was to listen more — and to listen carefully. To listen to what the code is trying to tell me, and follow the path it wants to evolve toward. To listen to tests, and how they can help me mold the design. 1/3

A problem with modern LLMs is that they are so convincingly anthropomorphic now that when they produce wildly incorrect responses like this one, my reaction isn't "oh, I found a bug", it's "you're a lying sack of shit!"... and that level of emotional reaction to a piece of code really isn't healthy.

Whatever your problem might be, I heard you just need to add more rules in the .cursorrules file.

If you reduce the cost of building features I guess what you'll get is more features. I hope that's what customers actually needed.

Using AI to create big batches of code faster instead of using it for sooner delivery of thin slices - which, by the way, I don't think was ever a constraint in product development, but anyway. That's what you get when slapping a tool on a wrong underlying mindset. Doing wrong things faster.

Published: On the benefits of trunk-based development Whenever we suggest trunk-based development, we are called unprofessional and belittled. How can we possibly produce quality? But in all honesty, for trunk-based development teams, quality is the highest concern. thinkinglabs.io/articles/202...

The lack of (explicit) prioritization doesn't mean that prioritization is not taking place. When there's too much WIP in the system, prioritization is inherent, just that it's implicit and someone that has way less context than the one that should prioritize ends up doing it.

"Post-Doom teaches that, ironically, it is the very urge to cling to hope and the faith in progress and tech that is driving us faster and faster toward our own annihilation. When we refuse to acknowledge natural limits, then we end up hastening the very outcome that we want to avoid." John Halstead