Once again, thank you to Colin for taking notes.

Topics that made the cut:

1. Data nerds and the (un)natural world
   • Tracking data
   • Examples: Apartment prices in building, MAX Car #s, License plate photos from all 50 states
   • These are unnatural world
   • Like stargazing and philosophy
   • “boardgamegeek.com” games played database, bridge, chess, Magic the gathering, scrabble tend to be “solo” games
   • Given a data set how do you find a signal in there?
   • “Kids game”, I have a device that easy to capture, fun, wasn’t seeking data
   • Idle curiosity, liking to measure and capture
   • Similar to days before, shell collections etc, collecting comes first
   • Technology captures
   • Quantity of data
   • Journaling events in calendar, e.g. sleep in google calendar, morning routine etc, corrected as it happens and tweaks (why do we have empty spaces on calendars?)
   • becoming useful, e.g. density of out of state drivers
   • Act of collecting changing your view (vs only collecting for a reason or goal)
   • Collecting is noticing, becoming aware
   • Collecting and Mining, sometimes can’t tell you why the other is important, but doing the other gives you a new perspective
2. How to learn more Git
   • Git is powerful
   • Easy to screw up a checkin
   • Live in fear of so many comitters
   • We should have git competency, aptitudes that everyone should have, and an advanced set of skills that someone in the group should have
   • One in the “group” vs one in the “building”?
   • Could have Git “moves” algorithm to do things safely, recipe of safe ‘moves’
   • Safety vs correctness
   • Problem is git safe stuff is right by unsafe stuff
   • Commits every 5 minutes
   • Source control complexity, much comes from the idea of “storing unfinished work” (git has stash, branch, other tools)
   • Software development is chaos, discovery, exploration – Is that inherently problematic? Not modeled properly in source control?
   • Short branch and frequent integration, a long branch is a bad branch
   • Could pick a core set of git practices that favor good behaviors (How to communicate this?)
3. Probes for Complex Problems
   • How do we deal with problems? not sure of scope, don’t know the right way through etc.
   • How do you wrestle with them?
   • Being ok with failing
   • Mystery problems, not sure why it’s broken.. collect more data? Get a better view of what is going on?
   • Agile – Try a solution, iterate, ship frequently
   • “what do I NOT know how to do?” Tackle the unknowns first
   • Top to bottom solutions, a “spike” all the way through quickly
   • breaking problems down
   • Go for a model problem,what embodies the hard part of the problem, but is simple in other respects? (solve a smaller problem first)
   • Learn the parts, relationships
   • “I don’t think there are any problems that can’t be broken down”
   • How is a probe different than a solution? A probe is a test for a solution.
   • Your probe is based on assumptions that you make up front, you form a hypothesis and test it
   • Why are things the way they are? What would make that be wrong? Can we test that?
   • Gaming – solving real problems (e.g. the protein shape puzzle)
   • “Your problem is you don’t understand your problem” get used to it, play with it
   • “Mathematicians use “play” to mean very serious work” “and software engineers use “work” to mean very serious play”
   • Divide and conquer separates you from all the pieces, you get stuck in a reductionist mode)
4. The Gervais principle
   • (e.g. Ricky gervais)
   • Pyramid: Losers on the bottom, clueless in the middle, sociopaths on the top
   • Blog post on this problem
   • This describes a dysfunctional organization well
   • People choosing to do what is dysfunctional because it’s comfortable
   • Feedback from middle based on politics and yes men
   • Non-delivering political environment
   • The labels are very judgmental (and humor based), but the problem is real
   • Clueless band are highly loyal much more than the other layers are
   • Tribal leadership, 5 stages of evolution, cultural evolution
   • L1: Like in prison world sucks, L2: My life sucks, L3: I’m great but everyone else sucks, L4: Were great, L5: The world is great
   • Has to do with the way leadership make tribes, or tribes of tribes
   • Instil a sense of empowerment
   • Pyramid with positive layers, building it up without falling into above is a great achievement
   • They may have a lot of problems going on, but they are forgiven for achieving great things
5. What is the most significant change in software develop in the past 10 years?
   • Google
   • Stack overflow
   • Accessibility
   • Leveling sharing we’ve talked about forever is being delivered on (with the rise of the internet)
   • Huge repository of knowledge
   • You can almost always find someone else who has had a particular problem before, and what they tried or solved
   • Not just sharing and size of knowledge base but searching and filtering
   • We still really haven’t adjusted our model to realize
   • We don’t assess ability for new hires to rapidly acquire knowledge (habits in hiring that are hard to break)
   • Let developers decide who to hire, #1 question – Who do you follow online (e.g. where do you get info)
   • Another thing that we see, now you work in 3-6 languages at a time, because you can. (this wasn’t true before, couldn’t keep that much in your head)
   • Right sized lego blocks
   • “has this been done before, and can I find it?”
   • If I learned more I can contribute back and say how I found it, blog post on my outage, error, etc. Culture of contributing knowledge.
   • Google never confronts you with “that’s the wrong question”, searching is big skill, what terms? What question? How far back?
   • How far back do you have to go to figure out you’re doing the wrong thing?
6. Can we run our government like wikipedia?
   • Wikipedia runs interestingly today, some problems
   • How does wikipedia run?
   • Every kind of misbehavior is understood, never destroying information, transparency and history
   • goal to inform could be solid
   • People can find the media that agree with their world view, (confirmation bias)
   • How strong is special interest influence, power seeking?
   • You don’t have a total budget for pages on wikipedia, unlike the national budget
   • Decisions made impact people directly, unlike wikipedia info, may no agree with you
   • Heart of the question: Can we have a governance system that allows transparency? Feels like not yet.
7. How to get to ‘Done’ with an employee communication problem?
   • Recently had a long time employee leave due to reorganization of administration and shifting roles
   • Changed role of a person who had been around a long time, cause them to be unhappy
   • Mediation didn’t work
   • Most people are thinking about what they are going to say in response
   • Need to JUST LISTEN – True listening is a hard skill
   • There are things you can’t say, things that are inappropriate, business doesn’t allow the directness
   • Bringing up specific grievances instead is problematic, because they can be addressed.
   • Need to have other people who can take in the vague input and divine the direct problem
   • One of the problems – coming with focusing on “how do we get this done?” “how do we solve the problem?”
   • The thing needs to be allowed to NOT be done in order to get to done
   • When people do a job change this affects them negatively, you get a negative curve for a while, you need to help them settle out. You have to be checking in with them, face to face conversations
   • Working with introverts, have to elicit feedback (and respect it)
   • Change cycle is similar to grief cycle (“my job has just died”)

Sorry for the brevity this time, but here are the topics:

Social score/Social Karma

What skills should a junior developer have?

But they are so messed up!

Developing with a team in different locations/Thoughts of working with folks in different timezones/countries

Google glass

Best tool/tech to teach young people programming

Reading culture/social cues based on appearance

Mentoring Others

Expressing opinions about how we work vs actively influences others to work differently

Refactoring

Setting yourself targets

Communication to executive management

Favorite way to relax?

Still tired with 7+ hours sleep as a parent

Infrastructure projects

Silos in development

Product owners

(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