January 17, 2025
June 22, 2024
January 27, 2021
Product Dev Poem – 2021
Here I am, a productive developer eager to deliver maximum value to my customers and apply my innovation to company goals.
Open up JIRA and pick up a unit of work to produce today – gotta stay faithful to those story points!
Somehow, a magic team of spherical devops in a vacuum created an environment where things are just green, predictable, and are never broken.
Another theoretical team of angels from a parallel universe has materialized into this one, updated all the docs, and beamed back into their universe of productivity and effectiveness.
Unit of work defined, I then proceed to produce it for a few hours completely uninterrupted, since if another human being were to make contact, I’d simply explode and format my hard drive, losing all my productivity.
It’s break time – I ingest 2 story points of coffee and join a game of table tennis. The ball bounces back and forth without ever touching the ground. My movements are productive, and value-adding, just like my partner’s.
Back to producing units of work, only half a story point left (sike! no such thing as half a story point, and no such thing as “left”, as it’s a measure of effort, not time. Almost got you there!).
Git push! Automatic CI gains consciousness and validates that my work unit has no chance of causing a user to break our software. It gives me a thumbs up and discards its human shell to fade back into the ones and zeros. A QA engineer cries out in the distance.
A metric of my productivity is logged to the OKR database.
Nothing breaks, and nothing unexpected happens, as the universe is completely predictable.
June 21, 2019
Iris Scott (American, b. 1984, based Brooklyn, NY, USA) - Cephalopod, 2019 Paintings: Oil Finger Painting on Canvas
(Source: irisscottfineart.com, via omni)
June 5, 2019
“ Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.
John Holt
October 25, 2018
“ Remember, a temp file is just a pipe with an attitude and a strong will to live
Randal Schwartz [comp.unix.questions]
May 9, 2017
Elon Musk Just Gave Some Brilliant Career Advice. Here It Is in 1 Sentence
“People are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves. It does not automatically improve. It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better, and actually it will, I think, by itself degrade, actually.
You look at great civilizations like Ancient Egypt, and they were able to make the pyramids, and they forgot how to do that. And then the Romans, they built these incredible aqueducts. They forgot how to do it.”
April 28, 2017
TGM Pressure Points #1-4
PP#1 Right heel pad against left thumb
PP#2 Last 3 fingers of left hand
PP#3 Right index finger against shaft
PP#4 Left arm against chest
March 24, 2017
“
The trick to being successful with JavaScript is to relax and allow yourself to slightly sink into your office chair as a gelatinous blob of developer.
When you feel yourself getting all rigid and tense in the muscles, say, because you read an article about how you’re doing it wrong or that your favorite libraries are dead-ends, just take a deep breath and patiently allow yourself to return to your gelatinous form.
Now I know what you’re thinking, “that’s good and all, but I’ll just slowly become an obsolete blob of goo in an over-priced, surprisingly uncomfortable, but good looking office chair. I like money, but at my company they don’t pay the non-performing goo-balls.” Which is an understandable concern, but before we address it, notice how your butt no-longer feels half sore, half numb when in goo form, and how nice that kind of is. Ever wonder what that third lever under your chair does? Now’s a perfect time to find out!
As long as you accept that you’re always going to be doing it wrong, that there’s always a newer library, and that your code will never scale infinitely on the first try, you’ll find that you can succeed and remain gelatinous. Pick a stack then put on the blinders until its time to refactor/rebuild for the next order of magnitude of scaling, or the next project.
Waterluvian
December 21, 2016