Comments by "Martin Maat" (@MartinMaat) on "Continuous Delivery" channel.

  1. Rock stars typically do not present themselves, they are created by poor planning and a lack of vision. A project is running late and someone puts in the overtime to make it deliverable. I think the focus here lies too much on the person who ultimately saves the day. He is not the problem nor the structural solution. On a side note: some mildly successful entrepreneur once said: "A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players." And this is hard to dispute.
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  2. I largely agree but would add that collective responsibility can be most destructive and frustrate the touted autonomy. If nothing is really yours and everything is everybody's, how could one feel responsible for anything and feel free to work on anything? This only works with people you agree with and are equally competent, which is rare. If I learned anything it is to be weary of collective responsibility. Places where this is promoted are typically passive/reactive, with people either frustrating each other rather than stimulating each other.
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  3. This can be useful within a single process too. I recently worked with a product that was split up in several components (domains) that each had their own main thread. They subscribed to each other's events and called into each other at will. With a subscription you could choose what thread you wanted to be called on. It was a total mess: side effects could call back into the calling component without you being aware of it, causing hard to track down deadlocks. Unfortunately no one recognized this as a problem worth addressing. I no longer work there and with some distance to the matter am now creating a framework/library that fixes the issues I had to deal with when I was working there. The concepts/principles presented in the video are identical to what I've come up with so far.
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  4. You are in management, aren't you?
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  5. I also figured she could be his sister or an AI. But I googled her, it turns out she is a speaker on meta-software development issues.
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  6. I've seen that too. As a supplier you often need to lie to get a foot in the door and outmaneuver your competitor, just to get the work or sell your product (that doesn't exist yet). And customers are asking to be lied to, they want the rosy picture, not the reserved, realistic, conservative story. They want solutions, not more problems. A report like the one discussed here is just another manifestation of that. "New methodology". You feel you have no control? Good news! You CAN be in control after all! And we have just the experts for you to help you with that! See you in ten to twenty years when you figured out it wasn't all it was cracked up to be, we 'll have some other story for you ready by then.
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  7. What a depressing take this is. "They don't care, here's how to make yourself more attractive to them". I guess that works if you're a submissive masochist. The market is jumpy. One skill that is hot today may be out tomorrow. If you don't have a position in a company you are a subject to the waves. As an employee you can either keep surfing until you are independent or dig yourself in somewhere in a stable environment and make it painful for the company to let you go. That is, not be part of that layer that will be disposable by design because of desired flexibility.
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  8. I would argue big upfront design is never the problem, it is big upfront implementation you may be wary about. The trouble with half-baked design in an evolving team is that less experienced or just time constrained developers will tend to extend what is there rather than to refactor. They will have enough trouble figuring out how it works now and build their solution on top of that. So if you as an initial designer don't carve the basics into stone, it is likely to grow into that big ball of mud. It all comes down to 1. the ability of people to recognize flaws in a design; 2. to understand well enough how it currently works to be able to turn things around while maintaining behavior; 3. to get the time to modify. Those are a lot of hurdles that get bigger in time. So you'd better make sure you do not leave any loose ends at the start, design-wise.
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  9.  @ContinuousDelivery  We do not completely disagree, I agree with the continuous evolvement and refinement part. It is just that I have seen too much "refinement" of poorly designed systems. I think you will agree that mistakes in design are the most expensive kind of mistakes. The assumption that someone will fix these somewhere down the line in an iterative fashion is overly optimistic in my opinion and experience.
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  10. Just one more word. Control, Clan, Canal, anything that starts with a C.
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