This was our first meeting in the new 29th floor lunch room at the New Relic office in Portland, up from the 28th floor.

Discussion topics :

• Is wearable technology ready for adoption?
• “Sexy Tech” (Node, go, Core OS, Docker, etc)
• What defines a good interview question?
• Conference Behavior
• Human Speed
• What is a computer (VM, container, cluster, etc)

(Thanks to Colin Dabritz for taking notes)

Misogyny + Bigotry in tech

• lots of incidents recently
• maybe some of this crossover from video games?
• lack of professionalism in general
• Are parts of the culture perpetuating a lack of professionalism?
• Casual culture, you feel less ‘accountable’ but you are representing a company, profession
• profession is young, no liscensure to revoke (e.g. you can’t be disbarred for unethical behavior)
• Youth culture contributes

How much prediction making do you do?

• Agile, so many unknowns can’t predict, so don’t. Manage and move.
• Sales need targets, sometimes hard deadlines.
• lost of people forget, can adjust schedule or features
• Mcconnel estimation (book)
• This is an exploration, research, not mechanized process
• Predictions are dangerous, can become constraints
• Predictions can be important to coordinate, can cause issues, why not buffer?
• Just make the development team as productive as possible
• Making predictions is natural, making promises

What kind of interruptions do you allow? How do you manage them?

• git stash – temporarily ‘stash’ work
• Kanban – focusing on the thing  you are doing
• Feel about – “oh great, I’m accumulating inventory in my warehouse that’s costing me money”
• (who fights fires this week?)
• allow? can’t choose interruptions, distractions
• (context switching is expensive)
• (understanding management vs maker schedule)
• (true fires, understand the cost)
• (have a good product manager, prioritize properly)

How do you manage your brain?

• Problems in work and life don’t always give you a choice
• Do what you want to be good at, e.g. if you switch to managing that’s a shift, you will lose some dev ability.
• Learning, practicing
• Taking breaks (pacing)
• Managing stress
• Learn your rhythms, 90 mis is a magic number for me, give yourself time, find others who can handle your rhythm
• Be mindful of the things you put into your brain (e.g. sources of news, how they make you feel)
• your environment, habbits
• surround with smart[er] people, choose your work, environments
• exercise, diet, socialization
• Space – space where it’s easy to access healthy things, exercise, standing desks
•      – Avoid stress, ability to move and adjust, eat good food
• Competitive can be stressful, but can also be positive, pushing you.
• Stress spectrum, can be different kinds
• autonomy, mastery, purpose
• too comfortable, not exploring new things
• sharpen the saw, be attentive, prioritize yourself and your brain, get coaching

Forward thinking companies

• Have you heard of OKCupid? Was it because of the service, or the blog posts with data?
• How is this measured?
• Being trusted experts. (Unbounce)
• Who do you think of as forward thinking? Company providing fungus that acts like styrofoam
• Cellular level mechanism, nanotechnology, nano power generation in clothing
• SpaceX
• Used to think of google as a forward thinking company
• Challenging norms
• Code schools
• Connecting
• trying new things
• Try to solve a problem that doesn’t affect just the privilege of the bay area
• Companies that measure
• Watsi
• Do VCs and the startup industry promote this?
• Pharmacutical companies, make or break on FDA approval

What’s hard or challenging?

• Simple – to make or do simple things, always harder than the compacted.
• e.g. quitting smoking. Very simple, very challenging.
• Changing habits
• Software – making it simple, elegant is hard.
• Understanding the problem
• Quick feedback loop makes things easier, long or complex feedback loop is much harder
• People issues are a long feedback loop
• People are hard
• Department has “solutions” in the name, but uninterested in the solutions, much more interested in the problems
• The problem is you don’t understand the problem
• Starting with the wrong question, finding the right question
• Exploring the landscape
• Follow up, follow through, ideals
• Doing the RIGHT thing now, vs the fast easy thing
• Working in teams
• Others perspective, doing the right thing for everyone
• Being ethical for all stakeholders
• The unknown unknowns
• Missing pieces, missing requirements
• Communicating ideas, sharing vision
• (Vulnerability, taking real personal risk)

Learning Center

• making a space where learning happens
• Where existing engineers can mentor, and improve their own skills
• Book: The quick start guide to the five years of accelerated learning Willem + Diana Larsen
• First thing you do is take care of peoples basic needs (comfortable, fed, relaxed, welcome)
• Mix between – solid, things aren’t moving, not a good environment. gas – chaotic, moving too much. Liquid – move enough
• Zone of proximal development
• Whiteboards – Whiteboard paint (“winking”)
• What makes a learning environment welcoming?
• What motivates people to learn?
• Parents sense of expectation was a big driving force in undergrad
• Suddenly having to come up with intrinsic motivation was hard
• Book: “Confessions of a buccaneer scholar”

Programers are to sysadmins as doctors are to surgeons

(missed notes here)

Vacation – do you check-in or not?

• “what is a ‘Vacation'”? (sarcasm)
• What types of responsibilities does your job have?
• If you’re at a job/company
• (lost notes)

When do you prefer to test?

• TDD
• Testing used to be an entry level position
• Testing has become a senior level activity
• Testing increases the understanding of the code
• Every bug in the code will eventually be found.  You want a tester or a test to find it rather than a customer.
• Tiny little testable steps
• Focu work on a small unit
• Always move forward
• Deliver features vs Deliver Quality
• You get what you measure.

Learning to talk while programming

• How do you learn to communicate
• Pair programming is experiental.  People get frustrated if it doesn’t pay off immediately.  (much like riding a bike)
• Can you pair with somebody you don’t like?
• “Code buddy”
• Must self-select your code buddy
• Conflicts can cause big trouble
• Mature developers have habits and skills which they have learned over time
• Stereotype of programmers: late nights/pizza
• working alone lets you conceal your weakness
• Egoless programming
• when you pair, problems that confuse both people are immediately visible as serious problems
• One participant can tune out

What makes a graph feel “live”?

• What does “live” mean in context?
• Drill in (nagios)
• Google street view
• Responsive UI vs live data
• Travel sites which take a while to search
• Convention in TV and movies: displays always have text which is updating (2001 screens, Terminator)
• As things get slower they get harder to think about
• Attention span
• latency
• Graphs that update
• Weather maps
• Interface vs data

Executable instructions

• Instead of documentation about how to do something, how about a script which is executable and readable?
• Need a language that is executable and robust for human to human communication
• Chef
• Avoid a “Wizard” – leads to no understanding of how things are done
• Smalltalk let you have “Run” as part of editing

New iPhone

• New UI
• Buttons were not present but came back in in later betas of iOS7
• Flat UI: Windows 8 phone
• Skeumorphism
• Change for change’s sake vs improvement

Presentation of one’s self (Facebook vs LinkedIn)

• Different venues, different expectations
• work/life balance
• How does Twitter fit in?
• Credibility/trust must be earned
• Context
• Not everybody has a FB acct

Resources for learning about agile software dev

• XP pocket guide
• Thin books aren’t intimidating
• Find books that you like, look for “people who bought this also bought” on Amazon
• Books leave out failures, sound like every project is successful
• c2.com wiki
• “less wrong” web site

What makes programming problems fun?

• like solving a puzzle
• Sudoku solvers can be more fun problems than sudoku puzzles
• Fun to not work within an existing codebase
• “That’s what I do for work”
• Demonstrate mastery
• setting own goals
• refactoring?

Best invite to LC

• Bring a great idea for people to explore
• Friendly people, coffee
• exercise for my brain
• light switch (or lens) for your thought process
• thinking about metacognition

Who is worth following, and how do you know?

– Who is saying original things?
– Curators are still valuable as navigators
– People who rephrase and clarify can be valuable too
– similar problem to cites in academia

What non-tech skills make a team work well?  How can you encourage them?

– Some people seem to “smooth out” the team
– Can you self-disclose?
– Know when to trust
– Responsiveness

Having a concrete job offer vs deciding to wait for better?

– Are you finding your next job, or are you finding the last job you will ever have?
– Define “good enough”
– Know where you want to improve
– Will this job help you achieve a goal?
– Geography?
– Hiring bonus?
– research on glassdoor, etc

Organizational Antibodies

– Sometimes people resist change as a defensive measure
– Sometimes people are upset because their cheese is being moved
– Some antibodies are appropriate
– Governance is a common antibody to resist agile

Hiring senior vs jr developers

– Fresh blood
– fresh perspective
– can help in succession planning
– Give people responsibility then live with them.  Struggles and failure are great teaching and learning opportunities
– “Junior” is not “cheap”.

AgilePDX community building

– How do we build a community?
– Why do we build a community?
– networking
– meet outsiders
– movers & shakers vs watchers
– The “in” group is it’s own worst enemy.

Balancing Creators & Elaborators

– Code that shows an idea vs code that we can depend on
– Deleting code can be a great embellishment
– Pair a creator with an Elaborator, can enrich both
– TDD can help to creators to work together

Architecture and Culture

– Conway’s Law
– Can you use architecture to drive cultural change
– sometimes you need to hire a contractor who is expert in where you want to be

Working with allies outside of IT (HR, Facilities, etc)

– Go to them early, establish communication
– People don’t know everything that others do, don’t know how their needs impact other departments
(Facilities will have time & budgets, HR doesn’t realize how long it takes to do pert reviews, etc)
– See what other’s objectives are, see you your needs can help them achieve their objectives

How many reverts is too many?

– Be bold
– Knowledge emerges
– What moves you forward?
– What gets in your way?
– Tolerance of mistakes
– Maybe too many things are in flight
– responsiveness
– service recovery vs service consistency