(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

Thanks again for Dan for writing up notes.

1. Naming is hard (how to)
   • “2 hard problems in CSc: naming & cache invalidation”
   • very important
   • names that are wrong are like an itch you can’t scratch
   • naming conventions
   • language conventions
   • help you things if names are good
   • happy collisions
   • project glossaries
2. organizing iterations when team has multiple responsibilities
   • operations
   • support
   • dev
   • multiple projects
   • individual may not have anough info to prioritize
   • protocols to deal with unexpected incidents (prod)
   • different colors on the task board
   • fudge factor in estimating
   • being able to deal with this is a sign of maturity
3. Ageism
   • larger companies tend to have a bigger spread
   • some people devalue older coders who don’t know the lates/greatest
   • maybe pair younger coders with older experienced ones
   • “don’t type as much, but get stuff done”
   • some older people can be set in their ways
   • broader toolkit
   • younger consultants, don’t say no for themselves
   • “how important is that work?”
   • sometimes it’s good to step back
   • is capacity for work changing with age?
4. Where innovation happens?
   • tech, edu
   • startups, small companies, garages
   • education is socially very conservative
   • lots of regulation around schools
   • charter schools – not very different from a conventional school
   • tweaking the classic formula
   • technology in schools isn’t disruptive by itself
   • khan academy
   • still doing the same basic formula: tests, homework, course materials
   • locus of control is far away from the classroom, has different goals
5. Retrospectives
   • what makes a retrospective good?
   • post-mortem is different, after a large project ends
   • “teachrospective”
   • recognition, prime decision making
   • why do things go wrong?
   • ask the right questions
   • retrospective is a steering activity
   • followup on past issues
   • not just a bitch session
6. Dealing with a dominant team member
   • might be very good
   • might just be pushy
   • needs to be a team solution
   • peer pressure
   • they may think that they are doing what is best for the team
   • need to have that “a ha” moment when they realize that they are hurting the team
   • PM with good facilitation skills can help
   • behavior profiles, analagous to Meyers-Briggs
   • strengths-finder
7. Dealing with a weak team member
   • not getting work done, passive
   • what motivates them?
   • they do have strengths, find them!
   • how does the team approach it?
   • give them a mentor
   • career level may not be the same as their skill level
   • autonomy, mastery, purpose
   • let them pick first
8. Group size
   • past 12 or so you can’t make a decision
   • 5-6 can get a lot done, larger needs more coordination
   • how fungible are the tasks
   • “moving a house” works well with big groups
   • making a decision
   • spread ownership
   • optimum team sizes from the group?
   • 5 ish for software
   • larger teams work well if they know each other well and collaborate well
9. Burnout
   • it can grow
   • can’t sustain work at a high level
   • getting tired a few times a year can be good. More than that can wear you out.
   • Not enough “no”
   • beating your head against the wall
   • get fresh ideas, read more
   • “the progress principle” book
   • “frustration is the opposite of progress”

Special Thanks to Dan for creating these notes.

Meetings/punctuality/etiquette
– Meetings need to have a purpose/agenda
– some cultures punish tardiness, could be shaming, could be financial
– Some cultures treat being overbooked as a sign of status

Use of automation/macros
– machine setup
– machine activities (shutdown at a certain time, etc)
– tech support (standard text responses)
– how much do you customize your environment?

What is Agile?
Definition proposed was about helping teams work faster, we disagreed with that but couldn’t stabilize on what it is

Human Systems Dynamics
– Method of managing interaction between people
– know what you know, what you can potentially know, what you can’t know
– US Navy submarine control room anecdote: Discussions happen in public, everybody participates, Captain makes a decision
– All information is visible to everybody in the discussion
– No holding back
– Helps bring new people up to speed
– Helps spread institutional knowledge

Dogfooding
– Is it useful? Can be if the people dogfooding the product are the ones who build it
– Can show confidence in your product

Finding Tech talent in PDX
– Not enough talent
– Paying relocation costs to bring in talent can be a sticking point
– People outside of the PDX area don’t necessarily know what the job market is like in PDX
– People churning around locally costs everybody time and money

1. How do you describe Agile?

– Fail fast
– Start with stories- humans like stories
– Lean – get results in front of people as fast as possible
– Customer driven
—who are the customers in your context?
– Lightweight
– Try Lean Coffee
– An interesting problem, and the generalization makes a lot of sense
– Do civil engineers do a lot of projects that are information based or are adaptable?
– Buildings iterate less well, where is the iteration?
– Examples: A map, a budget
– Iterate: the plan WILL change
– As a ___ I want___so that ___
-structure for stories includes protagonist and goal
– Provide value

2. McDonald’s Theory/Social Hacks

– The McDonalds hack see https://medium.com/what-i-learned-building/9216e1c9da7d
– Useful if discussion is deadlocked, or team needs to get unstuck
– Propose something bad then you can get a response, get people to commit
– Posting bad information (to draw out good information)
– Devious trait
– Name Tags with trivia to jumpstart conversations/team building idea
– Adjusting expectations
– Lean coffee
—the structure of lean coffee is a form of social hack
– Personality trait? Learned skill?
– “I’m just a dumb XYZ but…”
– Parenting
—-lots of tricks parents learn
– Names and memory tricks
– Icebreakers, conversation starters (a lot of facilitation/teaching tricks are social hacks)
– Breaking an impasse
– Listening

3. How do you get your creative flow going?

– Pomodora technique
– Should I be doing something? Yes or No? No? Don’t lie, just do it.
– Find your sweet spot (early morning, quiet times)
– Have to feel safe to create
– Self-shaming works to get going
– the “Cone of Silence” (a traffic cone outside the door means don’t interrupt)
– just getting started is the hardest part, momentum matters a lot
– other people – interacting with others, socializing and discussing to get creative flow going
– making opportunity (you have to create your own opportunities for creative work, this is the hard part!)
– get enough sleep (manage your needs and stress)
– long term investment in creative collaborative space

4. How do you work with other groups to determine backlog priority?

– User requirements gathering
– In Scrum, needs to be one person
– Use Lean to get stories up to customer

5. Writing stories for multiple audiences

– Have customer draw out what they want
– EPIC- can be broken into smaller stories
– Scott uses Pivotal Tracker to track
– stories change when the user is presented with a prototype (e.g. screen mockups)
– manage expectations
– the cost of coding is high (iterate the ideas first)
– customers tend to be unengaged at the ‘coding’ phase
story -> picture -> functionality

6. Getting kids interested in STEM
– Coder dojo
– Lego robotics
– Mind storms- Lego Robotics “building a robot”
– Make it fun and relevant
– Chemistry teacher makes it a little dangerous (teens like that)
– dangerous experiments (encourage their inner pyromaniac)
– Must be learner driven (if they don’t control their own engagement they won’t be interested)
– “We lack a ‘moonshot'”
—disagree, our moonshots aren’t as well known, and are less ‘personal’ than e.g. an astronaut
– unstructured?
– exciting
– visibility of the job?

7. What makes a good LeanCoffee topic?
– Relevant to participants
– Something someone is curious about
– How do I (??) so that I can (???)
– collecting topics (during the week note when you have good lean coffee topic thoughts)
– Ice Breakers
– Engagement
– Something people have a stake in
– “How do you…” (asking good journalism questions) Perhaps these tips apply: http://www.fastcompany.com/3003945/one-conversational-tool-will-make-you-better-absolutely-everything
– Good questions lead to good stories
– catharsis (but be careful of too much dumping)
– some good questions are based on relationships (asking for help with a problem, sharing thoughts, story telling)
– genuine (artificial topics don’t do well, contribute based on your own true interest in discussion)
– multiple P.O.V.s
– Sharing
– diversity
– a wide variety of styles, focuses, topic range,
– specific question vs broad prompt,
– opinion with commentary vs asking for help.

8. Best LinkedIn groups for Agile resources?

– LinkedIn is a little business-y (not that agile)

– Alicia is moderating this group: Agile Project Management (non-software)
– She is finding this question popping up across LinkedIn groups- Agile Alliance, Agile Project Management; will try to direct to Agile Project Management (non-software).
– Agile open NW
– Agile is a ‘toolkit’
– Variety
– “Scrumbut” (i.e. “we do Scrum, but….”)
– Lean Coffee!

Topics that made the cut:

1. Clipboard, Habit Maker, & Retro follow-through
   • Shared tools for helping changes from retrospectives stick
     1. A very large picture is put on the wall. Then covered with post-its that represent behavior changes to make (e.g., pair on a task). As team members complete the behavior change tasks, they remove the post-its. The first team member to guess what the image underneath is gets a prize.
     2. Behavior changes are put on a clipboard. A team member caries the clipboard and visits team members reminding them of the change. This is not a governance activity, but a reminder.
   • Justin points out that a group has to get to planning actions before they can follow through on them. Considered using a technique from above as “bait” to get a team to form actionable changes from a retrospective.
2. Accelerated Learning
   • Framework for learning from Willem Larsen. Featured in the book-in-progress Name This Book.
   • 5 Items: Alive, Fluency, Signal, Focus & Setting.
   • If you take only one thing from the model, create learning environments that recognize people’s humanity.
   • Noted that the “environment” and setting for retrospectives can greatly affect their effectiveness.
3. Water-SCRUM-fall, is it worth the pain?
   • When a program is structured very large and slow, with a staged release plan (e.g. in the first year, we’ll build the db…) but is to be run “agile” this causes pain for teams. What do to?
   • Team members tend to see activities such as iteration planning, backlog management, retrospectives, demos, etc. as “stupid” and “a waste of time”.
   • If you don’t have a purpose, it’s hard to know if you’re making
     progress toward a goal. Team may need to set its own sub-goals, if the business isn’t providing them.
   • Need to get the big program focussed on results. Outcomes, not output.
   • May come from fear of actually releasing. Business may not want the
     changes that would come from producing a result.
4. Agile/Kanban as Organiz. Design
   • How can Agile and Kanban be used in organization design?
   • Common models for org. design include Jay Galbraith’s Star Model. And the sociotechnical system.
   • Federated models and Agile/Kanban go well together.
5. Tricks for breaking out of ruts
   • I’m in a rut. How do you break out of ruts?
   • The Plateau Effect may help.
   • What about the 5 rules of Accelerated Learning?
   • Try getting others to see the same problem you see. Then you are not alone in working on the problem and not alone in the rut.
   • Ruts represent a conflict of desires. Boredom comes from prevention from doing what you want to do.
6. How do you use Lean for your extra-work creative projects?
   • Talked a lot about Personal Kanban
     • Books: Personal Kanban, Factory of One, David Starr has written a book about it, featured in WSJ.
     • Tools: LeanKit, trello
     • Beware the tyranny of the list. Kanban does not remove this.
     • Differentiate between “holding” and “blocked” items.
     • Can try to sort tasks by size. Then when presenting with time to take on a task, grab one that fits the available time.
     • How about Family Kanban?
   • Briefly touched on family retrospectives.
7. Merging two overlapping products and technology stacks
   • Merging (through acquisition) two products that overlap in both audience and functionality.
   • Anti-recommendation: bigwigs decide how people will work, ignoring realities. Instead, try to bring people doing the work together early and give them a chance to solve the problem from the engineering perspective. Create value teams.
   • What does success look like? What will failure look like?
   • Is there common understanding of the overlap? Figure out how to make the people excited about doing the work – technical challenges? how will it build their careers?
   • Recognize what’s been learned so far.
   • Focus on merging people over merging technology
   • What do the people stand to gain?